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[–]penelopepnortneyBecome ungovernable[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

i just came across a fun article that may well explain quite a lot.

it selected 200 american adults with advanced degrees. [graphic shows % breakdown of people w/a Masters and a PhD in humanities/social sciences, medicine, mathematics, natural science/technology and other (e.g., education]

they were asked to gauge study abstracts and rate their assessment of their quality on a scale of 0-100. it used the same two abstracts for all participants...

The manipulation always consisted in the addition of the following [meaningless mathematical formula] at the end of the abstract.

and adding “mathiness” to an abstract caused people to rate it more highly in inverse proportion to how much they knew about math and models.

for humanities, social sciences the variance was large and stat sig (p<0.01) and for other (including education) it was twice as big and also stat sig (p<0.01). that’s a helluva p value for an N this small. this seems to be a VERY pronounced effect and it gets worse the less expert in math you are.