Background : Weak statistical literacy and biases in human cognition (e.g., denominator neglect) impede the citizen’s abilities to recognize statistically fallacious claims in the news. Such claims can be fact-checked by human experts, but it takes at least a few hours during which news readers can be exposed to less-than-valid claims.
Methods: As an interim solution, this study proposes aTag:stats, a tag attached to mobile news articles to point out claims that are based on incomplete statistical data. The aTag:stats visualizes the data–claim structure of an argument, while providing rebuttal comments on the omission in the statistical data. The effects of aTag:stats were tested using an online questionnaire, with two mock economy news articles: Car Insurance and Greenhouse gas (GHG). Participants responded to the same questions twice, with the control condition (news text only) and with the experimental condition (news text with aTag:stats) on what they can infer from the given information and how they perceive the validity of claims. Later, they rated the perceived information sufficiency of the news text and aTag:stats.
Results: In both Car Insurance and GHG data collected with the experimental condition, the inference scores were higher, the perceived validity ratings were lower, while the information sufficiency of aTag:stats were rated higher than that of the news text. The aTag:stats, by translating word problems to numerical expressions of fractions and equations, brought the participants’ attention to the absence of denominator and base data, while reducing the participants’ cognitive load.
Conclusions: We concluded that the aTag:stats presented the participants opportunities to critically evaluate the statistical claims in the news and informed them on the incompleteness of data. In the future studies, statistical fallacies where the argument structure can be better explained and exposed in formats other than fractions will be experimented.