October 8, 2020

Don’t Dumb It down: The Effects of Jargon in COVID-19 Crisis Communication

Category: Article Summary

Topic: Public Health Policy and Practice

Keywords (Tags): public health

• An online survey experiment among workers contacted through the Amazon MTurk platform (n=393) found that science communication using technical jargon was more difficult for participants to process in low urgency situations, but that jargon did not substantially reduce processing in high urgency situations like COVID-19. The authors suggest that high motivation to process information may moderate the effect of jargon in crisis situations.

Shulman and Bullock. (Oct 7, 2020). Don’t Dumb It down: The Effects of Jargon in COVID-19 Crisis Communication. PLOS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239524