Not as gloomy as we thought: reassessing how the public understands probability of precipitation forecasts

Abstract

ABSTRACTPrior research on probability of precipitation (PoP) forecasts showed that many people wrongfully believe that PoP forecasts are derived from a percentage of time, a percentage of a region or the strength of agreement among forecasters. We posit that the wording of interpretation selection tasks matters, because different response options are associated with different metacognitive feelings. We hypothesised that the incorrect PoP interpretations are more often chosen by participants because they are more fluent than the correct PoP interpretation. We assessed the role of fluency in correctness perception (Study 1) and reassessed PoP interpretations with a more fluent correct interpretation (Study 2). Fluency perception was positively related with perception of correctness. Furthermore, participants selected the correct fluent interpretation more often than the correct disfluent one. We have drawn a more optimistic picture of people’s PoP forecasts understanding than that shown before and have discussed the methodological and applied implications.