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

Prior research asking people to interpret probability of precipitation (PoP) forecasts showed that many of them 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 PoP interpretation tasks matters, because it is associated with different metacognitive feelings used as cues in situations of uncertainty. We hypothesised that the fluency of the correct PoP interpretation is lower than the fluency of the incorrect interpretations and will, in turn, increase preference for the incorrect interpretations. 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.