Researchers at the Center for Economic and Social Research at the University of Southern California recently discovered that vignettes — video and written stories about hypothetical people – can help near retirees better comprehend their social security claiming options.
Kim Blanton, who writes the Squared Away financial blog, summarized in her latest post a recent experiment undertaken by USC researchers in which they created a fictional 3-minute video of a 62-year-old man talking with a financial adviser about retirement. The researchers showed it to workers between 50 and 60 years old and found that the test subjects accurately answered more than 90 percent of the true-false questions about Social Security’s mechanics, compared with just 78 percent accuracy by the people who didn’t see a vignette.
The results of this experiment, the USC study concluded, could help inform the Social Security Administration on how to “communicate these complex concepts to the public.”