Date and time: Monday, Mar 9, 4:00pm, room C217.
Title: “Where are we going wrong? Evidence on
communicating probabilistic information"
Abstract:
Over the past years, numerical skills have become
increasingly necessary for navigating the modern health care environment.
Unfortunately, many people struggle to grasp numerical concepts that are
essential for understanding health-relevant information. In short, the general
public lacks basic numeracy, which limits their risk literacythe ability to
accurately interpret and make good decisions based on information about risk
(see www.RiskLiteracy.org). In this
talk, I will present a collection of studies investigating three research
questions. This research involves more than 5000 participants from 60 countries
and diverse walks of life (e.g., medical professionals, patients, general
populations, web panels). First, I will present research investigating how helpful
numbers are when communicating risks. This research converges to suggest that a
significant proportion of the population has problems understanding even very
simple numerical expressions of probability about health. Second, I will
present research investigating whether numeracy predicts health outcomes. This
research shows that compared to patients with high numeracy, patients with low
numeracy showed higher prevalence of comorbidity. Of note, these conclusions
hold after controlling for the effect of demographics and risk factors,
suggesting that numeracy is uniquely related to important health outcomes.
Finally, I will present the results of several interventions showing that
well-designed visual aids (1) help individuals with low in numeracy make more
accurate assessments of information about treatment risk reduction, and (2)
help promote shared decision making and healthy behaviors. I conclude that
appropriately designed visual aids can be highly effective, transparent, and
ethically desirable tools for improving risk communication, limiting the
influence of different levels of numeracy. Theoretical mechanisms, open
questions, and emerging applications of this research will be discussed.
Bio:
Dr. María del Rocío García Retamero Imedio is Associate Professor
in the Experimental Psychology Department, and Senior Member of the Learning,
Emotion, and Decision Research Group at the University of Granada. She is also
Associate Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and
Affiliated Professor and Researcher at the Michigan Technological University.
Dr. Garcia-Retamero is recipient of 10 major research awards, including the
American Psychological Association’s 2012 Raymond S. Nickerson Best Paper Award
and the prize of the University of Granada for the best paper in 2012 in Social
and Behavioral Sciences for her work on risk communication. Dr. Garcia-Retamero
is an expert in risk perception and the psychology of health decision making.
She has published 100 papers on the topic in top-ranking journals in Medicine
and Psychology. Dr. Garcia-Retamero has published 2 academic books. In
“Transparent communication of health risks: Overcoming cultural differences”
(2013), she shows that informed medical decision making heavily reinforced
these days by the legal requirements for informed consent critically depends on
communication of quantitative medical information. In her research, Dr.
Garcia-Retamero has shown that in most cultures doctors and patients have
severe problems grasping a host of numerical concepts that are prerequisites
for understanding and communicating health-relevant risk information. She
conducted a wide range of studies in more than 60 different countries, which
converge to demonstrate that problems associated with risk illiteracy are not
simply the result of cognitive biases preventing good decision making. Rather,
errors occur because ineffective information formats complicate and mislead
adaptive decision makers. Her studies document that information formats that
exploit people’s inherent capacity to recognize relationships in naturally
occurring problems (so-called transparent information formats) can dramatically
enhance risk comprehension, communication, and recall and foster better
decisions about health especially in patients with limited numeracy. Dr.
Garcia-Retamero has worked extensively for several international companies in
the design of decision aids to maximize risk understanding across diverse
populations. She has also trained physicians and nurses in risk understanding
and medical decision making in 11 countries.
Websites:
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