In the journal paper titled, “Violence Risk Assessment and Risk Communication”, Paul Slovic and his colleagues asked some mental health experts to determine whether it was safe to discharge a psychiatric patient, Mr. Jones, who had a history of violence.
The mental health experts were divided into two groups.
To experts in group 1, they were told that people similar to Mr. Jones had a 10% chance of being violent again after being discharged.
On the other hand, those in group 2 were told that out of every 100 patients similar to Mr. Jones, 10 were likely to be violent after being discharged.
Here’s where it gets interesting.
At the end of the experiment, experts who received information in the form of numbers (Group 2) were two times more likely than experts who received the same information in the form of percentages (Group 1) to deny the discharge.
Simply put, because of the way the information was presented to them, experts in Group 2 were twice as likely as experts in Group 1 to see Mr. Jones as a threat to society.
My key takeaway is that the motives of the information-bearer largely determines the manner in which information will be presented to you.
There’s an indication that if people want to play up the significance of a particular statistic, they are more likely to present it to you as raw numbers.
For instance, telling people “1 out of 1000 people who eat XYZ will get cancer” tends to be taken more seriously than saying “0.1% of people who eat XYZ will get cancer”.
Be wise in your information consumption during this period.