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Introduction: Mass marketing scams threaten financial and personal well-being. Grounded in fuzzy-trace theory, we examined whether verbatim and gist-based risk processing predicts susceptibility to scams and whether such processing can be altered.Methods: Online, 701 participants read a solicitation letter and indicated willingness to call an “activation number” to claim an alleged $500,000 sweepstakes prize. Participants focused on the solicitation’s verbatim details (hypothesized to increase risk-taking) or its broad gist (hypothesized to decrease risk-taking).Results: As expected, measures of verbatim-based processing positively predicted contact intentions, whereas measures of gist-based processing negatively predicted contact intentions.Contrary to hypotheses, experimental condition did not influence intentions (43% across conditions). Contact intentions were associated with perceptions of low risk, high benefit, and the offer’s apparent genuineness, as well as self-reported decision regret, subjective vulnerability to scams, and prior experience falling for scams.Conclusions: Overall, message perceptions and prior susceptibility, rather than experimental manipulations, mattered in predicting scam susceptibility.

PURPOSE: For patients to provide informed consent, they need to understand basic facts of their medical situation, which includes their expected prognosis. Most patients want detailed information about their illness, including what to expect as the end of life approaches. However, most patients with advanced solid tumors are not aware(1) of key pieces of prognostic information, such as that they likely have: 1) months, not years to live; and an illness that is 2) advanced (i.e., late-/end-stage); 3) incurable; and 4) terminal (i.e., that they are expected to die from cancer in the coming year). Thus, there exists an unmet need to improve advanced cancer patients’ prognostic understanding, including comprehension of approximately how long it will be until they die. What that time (qualitatively) will look and feel like is also important, but here, we focus on improving patients’ grasp of the (quantitative) prognostic timeframe. The GIST approach focuses on patients receiving essential information about their prognosis, receiving it in a way that they can comprehend, and having their individual values elicited and addressed so that the treatment plan can align with patients’ informed preferences. The premise of GIST (“Giving Information Strategically and Transparently”) is not merely to use simple words or short phrases, but to communicate in a way that will maximize the likelihood that patients will understand the take-home message of their medical situation, consider and apply their personal values to it, and live out their remaining time in a way consistent with their informed preferences. Whereas GIST builds on some prior communication frameworks in psychology(2-4) and medicine,(5-7) it is distinct from these other communication frameworks in that it targets prognostic understanding: the goal is patient comprehension of relevant medical facts. Unlike other approaches, GIST focuses on communicating the meaning of the prognosis to guide patient choices and promote shared, informed, value-consistent decision-making. INSTRUCTIONS: Below is an outline of the essential components of communicating prognosis to patients whose advanced gastrointestinal (GI), lung, or head and neck cancers are now shown to be worse on an imaging test (e.g., CT, PET, MRI) that will be discussed in clinic with them. [Although not all enrolled patients will have scan results indicating progressive disease in the first scan following study enrollment, we will follow enrolled patients over the course of the year. Our evidence-based expectation is that most patients (≥75%) will have scan results that reveal progression within this year.] Although this guide is not intended to be used as a script, this manual aims to provide “the gist” (the basic, “bottom-line” meaning or essence) of these “gist” talking points, and an easy-to-understand way to communicate that gist message to the patient. When telling the patient his/her prognosis (Step #5 below), we ask that you use the words (or very close to the exact wording) “most patients in your situation have months, and not years, to live” to communicate the gist of their prognosis. This guide is meant as a training resource, and the 4 steps below are suggestions in addition to universally important general communication principles such as always 1) ensuring the proper physical setting (quiet, private room where you’re sitting at eye level with patient), 2) attempting to include key family members and interprofessional team members (e.g., Nursing, Social Work), 3) pausing after each step before proceeding and 4) attending to emotions if the patient or family become upset (even before Step #3 below).

Legal systems often require the translation of qualitative assessments into quantitative judgments, yet the qualitative-to-quantitative conversion is a challenging, understudied process. We conducted an experimental test of predictions from a new theory of juror damage award decision making, examining how 154 lay people engaged in the translation process in recommending money damages for pain and suffering in a personal injury tort case. The experiment varied the presence, size, and meaningfulness of an anchor number to determine how these factors influenced monetary award judgments, perceived difficulty, and subjective meaningfulness of awards. As predicted, variability in awards was high, with awards participants considered to be "medium" (rather than "low" or "high") having the most dispersion. The gist of awards as low, medium, or high fully mediated the relationship between perceived pain/suffering and award amount. Moreover, controlling for participants' perceptions of plaintiffs and defendants, as well as their desire to punish and to take economic losses into account, meaningful anchors predicted unique variance in award judgments: A meaningful large anchor number drove awards up and a meaningful small anchor drove them down, whereas meaningless large and small anchors did not differ significantly. Numeracy did not predict award magnitudes or variability, but surprisingly, more numerate participants reported that it was more difficult to pick an exact figure to compensate the plaintiff for pain and suffering. The results support predictions of the theory about qualitative gist and meaningful anchors, and suggest that we can assist jurors to arrive at damage awards by providing meaningful numbers. (PsycINFO Database Record