ReviewPsychological bulletin2009
How numeracy influences risk comprehension and medical decision making.
Review in Psychological bulletin, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 386 papers, 6 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
386 citing papers in PubMed, 6 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 1,152 citations in OpenAlex.
- Empowering patient choice: a systematic review of decision aids for benign prostatic hyperplasia.BJU international · 2025Pooled it
- Taxonomies for synthesizing the evidence on communicating numbers in health: Goals, format, and structure.Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis · 2022Pooled it
- Evaluating the Association Between Low-Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol Reduction and Relative and Absolute Effects of Statin Treatment: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.JAMA internal medicine · 2022 · on this mapPooled it
- Developing and Validating Measures of Absolute and Relative E-Cigarette Product Risk Perceptions: Single Items Can Be Surprisingly Comprehensive.Nicotine & tobacco research : official journal of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco · 2022Pooled it
- Public and health professional epidemic risk perceptions in countries that are highly vulnerable to epidemics: a systematic review.Infectious diseases of poverty · 2022Pooled it
- Imprecision and Preferences in Interpretation of Verbal Probabilities in Health: a Systematic Review.Journal of general internal medicine · 2021Pooled it
- Infographics on risks associated with COVID-19 and the willingness to get the AstraZeneca vaccine: two randomized online experiments.BMC public health · 2024Trial
- Numbers, graphs and words - do we really understand the lab test results accessible via the patient portals?Israel journal of health policy research · 2020Trial
- When Does the Incremental Risk Format Aid Informed Medical Decisions? The Role of Learning, Feedback, and Number of Treatment Options.Medical decision making : an international journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making · 2020Trial
- The Effect of Including Quantitative Information on Multiple Endpoints in Direct-to-Consumer Prescription Drug Television Advertisements.Medical decision making : an international journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making · 2019Trial
- How does information on the harms and benefits of cervical cancer screening alter the intention to be screened?: a randomized survey of Norwegian women.European journal of cancer prevention : the official journal of the European Cancer Prevention Organisation (ECP) · 2019Trial
- Improvement of medical judgments by numerical training in patients with multiple sclerosis.European journal of neurology · 2019Trial
- Influence of Explanatory Images on Risk Perceptions and Treatment Preference.Arthritis care & research · 2018Trial
- Do visual aids influenced patients' risk perceptions for rare and very rare risks?Patient education and counseling · 2018Trial
- Ensemble averaging of symbolic numbers: Criterion mean judgments beat heuristics.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- Numeracy and recall of Alzheimer's disease risk information: Effects of risk format in a Latino community.Patient education and counseling · 2026Article
- Development and Validation of a Patient-Centered Scale to Evaluate Decision Aid Usability and Information Overload.Medical decision making : an international journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making · 2026Article
- Public Reporting in Cardiothoracic Surgery: Does Transparency Improve Care?Medical sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Article
- Supporting cardiomyopathy screening behavior in adult survivors of childhood cancer: an eHealth motivational interviewing-framed pilot intervention.Journal of cancer survivorship : research and practice · 2026Article
326 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
We review the growing literature on health numeracy, the ability to understand and use numerical information, and its relation to cognition, health behaviors, and medical outcomes. Despite the surfeit of health information from commercial and noncommercial sources, national and international surveys show that many people lack basic numerical skills that are essential to maintain their health and make informed medical decisions. Low numeracy distorts perceptions of risks and benefits of screening, reduces medication compliance, impedes access to treatments, impairs risk communication (limiting prevention efforts among the most vulnerable), and, based on the scant research conducted on outcomes, appears to adversely affect medical outcomes. Low numeracy is also associated with greater susceptibility to extraneous factors (i.e., factors that do not change the objective numerical information). That is, low numeracy increases susceptibility to effects of mood or how information is presented (e.g., as frequencies vs. percentages) and to biases in judgment and decision making (e.g., framing and ratio bias effects). Much of this research is not grounded in empirically supported theories of numeracy or mathematical cognition, which are crucial for designing evidence-based policies and interventions that are effective in reducing risk and improving medical decision making. To address this gap, we outline four theoretical approaches (psychophysical, computational, standard dual-process, and fuzzy trace theory), review their implications for numeracy, and point to avenues for future research.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.