Numbers Tell, Words Sell
Michael Thaler (University College London), Mattie Toma (University of Warwick) and Victor Yaneng Wang (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
GPI Working Paper No. 1-2025
When communicating numeric estimates with policymakers, journalists, or the general public, experts must choose between using numbers or natural language. We run two experiments to study whether experts strategically use language to communicate numeric estimates in order to persuade receivers. In Study 1, senders communicate probabilities of abstract events to receivers on Prolific, and in Study 2 academic researchers communicate the effect sizes in research papers to government policymakers. When experts face incentives to directionally persuade instead of incentives to accurately inform receivers, they are 25-29 percentage points more likely to communicate using language rather than numbers. Experts with incentives to persuade are more likely to slant language messages than numeric messages in the direction of their incentives, and this effect is driven by those who prefer to use language. Our findings suggest that experts are strategically leveraging the imprecision of language to excuse themselves for slanting more. Receivers are persuaded by experts with directional incentives, particularly when language is used.
Other working papers
Exceeding expectations: stochastic dominance as a general decision theory – Christian Tarsney (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk (like Pascal’s Mugging), and intolerably paradoxical in cases like the St. Petersburg and Pasadena games. In this paper I show that, under certain conditions, stochastic dominance reasoning can capture most of the plausible implications of expectational reasoning while avoiding most of its pitfalls…
The cross-sectional implications of the social discount rate – Maya Eden (Brandeis University)
How should policy discount future returns? The standard approach to this normative question is to ask how much society should care about future generations relative to people alive today. This paper establishes an alternative approach, based on the social desirability of redistributing from the current old to the current young. …
Moral uncertainty and public justification – Jacob Barrett (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) and Andreas T Schmidt (University of Groningen)
Moral uncertainty and disagreement pervade our lives. Yet we still need to make decisions and act, both in individual and political contexts. So, what should we do? The moral uncertainty approach provides a theory of what individuals morally ought to do when they are uncertain about morality…