The nonsense math effect
By Kimmo Eriksson. Judgment and Decision Making, 2012
71 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Mathematics is a fundamental tool of research. Although potentially applicable in every discipline, the amount of training in mathematics that students typically receive varies greatly between different disciplines. In those disciplines where most researchers do not master mathematics, the use of mathematics may be held in too much awe. To demonstrate this I conducted an online experiment with 200 participants, all of which had experience of reading research reports and a postgraduate degree (in any subject). Participants were presented with the abstracts from two published papers (one in evolutionary anthropology and one in sociology). Based on these abstracts, participants were asked to judge the quality of the research. Either one or the other of the two abstracts was manipulated through the inclusion of an extra sentence taken from a completely unrelated paper and presenting an equation that made no sense in the context. The abstract that included the meaningless mathematics tended to be judged of higher quality. However, this “nonsense math effect” was not found among participants with degrees in mathematics, science, technology or medicine.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/13c3720739e4aa52191e962c363ee58cb2c1073b
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Citations in the corpus
- Deconstructing the seductive allure of neuroscience explanations (2015, unknown): “Insights from experts can also help with this effort: Neuroscience experts in Weisberg et al. (2008) were not seduced by information that came from their own domain of exper-JudgmentandDecisionMaking tise (see also Eriksson, 2012), suggesting that increased education can be an effective antidote.”
- Intercoder Reliability in Qualitative Research: Debates and Practical Guidelines (2020, background): “Research shows inclusion of entirely nonsensical mathematical information can inflate judgments of the quality of research reports (Eriksson, 2012).”