Replication Study: Easiness effects in reading the plain language summaries of academic report

In use of the academic abstracts and the plain language summaries published on Journal of Social and Political Psychology, Kerwer et al.(2021)found undergraduates understood the plain language summaries better and gave them higher scores on the credibility, confidence to evaluate, and acquired ability to make decisions. These ratings are suggested as the index of easiness effect for reading plain language summaries. Kerwer et al. also found the plain language summaries lifted the readers’ intention to access the full text. On the other hand, they failed to find the association of participants’ knowledge background and summary style on each rating. Without the replication evidence based on the local materials, it is insufficient to claim the generalization of easiness effect across languages and cultures. This on-Internet replication study employed twelve abstracts from Chinese Journal of Psychology and the post-publication summaries on social media. The procedure followed the original study except the language fluency test and epitemistic emotion test. In terms of the prior power analysis, this replication study planned to collect at least 80 participants’ responses. The analysis plan and criterion followed the original study. The results confirmed the replications of comprehensibility and the easiness effect, and revealed the higher intention to access the full text. On the other hand, the alternative findings included the association of knowledge background and summary style, and post-test accuracies among the summary styles were nearly equal. Based on the language difference between original and replication studies, we discussed the plausible causes how the participants’ knowledge background altered the ratings among summary styles. The current results also indicated methodological limitations such as the lack of writing norms and the immature readability scale. For the potential applications of Chinese plain language summary, we suggested evidence-based guidelines are required for examining the positive and negative sides of easiness effect.