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Originally Posted by arjaybe
The researcher's blog post triggered poor reading in me. My eyes glazed over and my mind wandered. I think he was saying that if people thought they were reading something "genre," science fiction in their test, then they didn't try as hard as if they thought they were reading so-called literary fiction. Kind of fits expectations, doesn't it? I hope they do more studies with different comparisons. It might show something unexpected. We can hope, anyway.
We can also hope he gets someone else to write it up. Someone who uses fewer words and less jargon would be good.
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The study was scientific and so has to meet certain rigorous standards. The language used to describe it becomes specialized for that reason. It's usually the job of science journalists to translate for the layman, but unfortunately sensationalist writing is trumping accuracy in that field as drawing more eyeballs becomes a priority.
There was an unexpected conclusion from the study. It was hypothesized that people reading SF would put more effort into world building in their minds since it's usually quite different from what we're used to, but surprisingly that wasn't generally the case. My guess is that most people read SF for fun, and when they read SF-specific details, they are absorbed more for setting the mood rather than scrutinized for important information.