{"id":6531,"date":"2018-02-20T14:40:32","date_gmt":"2018-02-20T19:40:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/?p=6531"},"modified":"2018-02-18T14:42:38","modified_gmt":"2018-02-18T19:42:38","slug":"probably-underestimate-populations-eastern-states-areas-western-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/?p=6531","title":{"rendered":"You probably underestimate the populations of Eastern states and the areas of Western states"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW PAPER, NEW PRODUCT FEATURE USING PERSPECTIVE PHRASES<\/p>\n

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Click to enlarge<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

As mentioned a few times in past<\/a> posts<\/a>, we\u2019ve been doing research on how \u201cperspective sentences,\u201d for example \u201cIsrael is about the size of New Jersey in area and population\u201d helps Americans comprehend measurements beyond simply saying \u201cIsrael has an area of 20,770 square kilometers and a population of 8,793,000.\u201d We\u2019re happy to say that, due to the drive of Jake Hofman<\/a> and others, this research has now been incorporated into Bing search engine results:<\/p>\n

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Chris Riederer<\/a>, Jake Hofman<\/a> and I have just published a new paper on this topic which will be presented at CHI 2018<\/a>. In it, we propose and test methods for generating perspectives. For example, why do we feel that \u201croughly the population of California\u201d is better than \u201croughly 10 times the population of Oklahoma,\u201d even though they’re about equally accurate and even if the person you are talking to is from Oklahoma? It turns out that 10x not an ideal multiplier for people to work with (strange, we know) and Oklahoma is not ideal to use in examples.<\/p>\n

Christopher Riederer, Jake M. Hofman and Daniel G. Goldstein. (2018). To put that in perspective: Generating analogies that make numbers easier to understand<\/a>. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’18)<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the course of doing this research, we were able to generate some fun charts like the one at the top of the post. People underestimate the areas of pretty much all US states (above, top panel) but are especially bad at central and Western states. Furthermore, they underestimate the populations of Eastern states (above, bottom panel). The US is tricky for geographic inferences because many big states have small populations. This makes traditional election maps deceptive and have led to some (weird, we know) ways of rescaling them.<\/a> [BTW, if you are interested in the psychology of demographic estimation, we can recommend Brown and Siegler (1993)].<\/p>\n

Another thing we found is that people do a lot better estimating things when you give them a perspective sentence to help them (e.g., \u201cThe population of Poland is about as big as that of California. What is Poland\u2019s population?\u201d). The left chart below shows the improvement in area estimation (note that they still underestimate areas, even with hints) and the right chart shows improvement in population estimation. Click the chart to enlarge it.<\/p>\n

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Click to enlarge<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

If you\u2019d like to read more, here are some popular articles<\/strong> on the research:<\/p>\n