Plain language summaries for psychological studies

Easily comprehensible summaries of psychological studies, so-called plain language summaries, can be a powerful tool for communicating findings of scholarly articles to a wider audience. However, even though an APA Task Force on Translating Psychological Science for the Public published recommendations on this issue in 2014, our knowledge on how effective these lay summaries are for communicating findings of individual psychological studies to broader audiences is at best limited. Within this protocol, we preregister a study that will address three research questions on the effectiveness of plain language summaries, their properties, and the interaction of these properties with individual differences.

This is a preregistration of the article: Kerwer, M., Chasiotis, A., Stricker, J., Günther, A., & Rosman, T. (2021). Straight from the scientist’s mouth—plain language summaries promote laypeople’s comprehension and knowledge acquisition when reading about individual research findings in psychology. Collabra: Psychology, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.18898