Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Scientists seek to discover truths that are interesting andimportant. We characterized these notions by askinglaypeople to assess the importance, interestingness,surprisingness, practical value, scientific impact, andcomprehensibility of research reported in the journalsScience and Psychological Science. These judgments wereinterrelated in both samples, with interest predicted bypractical value, surprisingness, and comprehensibility, andimportance predicted mainly by practical value. However,these judgments poorly tracked the academic impact of theresearch, measured by citation counts three and seven yearslater. These results suggest that although people haveinternally reliable notions of what makes scienceinteresting and important, these notions do not trackscientific findings’ actual impact.