Mooers's law is a comment about the use of
information retrieval
Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the process of obtaining information system resources that are relevant to an information need from a collection of those resources. Searches can be based on full-text or other co ...
systems made by the American
computer scientist
A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science.
Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...
Calvin Mooers
Calvin Northrup Mooers (October 24, 1919 – December 1, 1994), was an American computer scientist known for his work in information retrieval and for the programming language TRAC.
Early life
Mooers was a native of Minneapolis, Minnesota, atte ...
in 1959:
Original interpretation
Mooers argued that information is at risk of languishing unused due not only on the effort required to assimilate it but also to any impliciations of the information that may conflict with the user's prior information. In learning new information, a user may end up proving their work incorrect or irrelevant. Mooers argued that users prefer to remain in a state of safety in which new information is ignored in an attempt to save potential embarrassment or reprisal from supervisors.
Out-of-context interpretation
The more common interpretation of Mooers's law is similar to
Zipf's
principle of least effort
The principle of least effort is a broad theory that covers diverse fields from evolutionary biology to webpage design. It postulates that animals, people, and even well-designed machines will naturally choose the path of least resistance or "effo ...
. It emphasizes the amount of effort needed to use and understand an information retrieval system before the information seeker gives up; it is often paraphrased to increase the focus on the retrieval system:
In this interpretation, "painful and troublesome" comes from ''using'' the retrieval system.
See also
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Availability heuristic
The availability heuristic, also known as availability bias, is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method, or decision. This heuristic, operating on the ...
*
Cognitive dissonance
In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information, and the mental toll of it. Relevant items of information include a person's actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. ...
*
Confirmation bias
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring ...
*
Satisficing
Satisficing is a decision-making strategy or cognitive heuristic that entails searching through the available alternatives until an acceptability threshold is met. The term ''satisficing'', a portmanteau of ''satisfy'' and ''suffice'', was introduc ...
References
*{{cite journal , last=Austin , first=Brice , date=June 2001 , title=Mooers' Law: In and out of Context , journal=Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology , volume=25 , issue=8 , pages=607–609 , doi=10.1002/asi.1114
External links
Calvin N. Mooers Papers, 1930-1992at the
Charles Babbage Institute
The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...
, University of Minnesota.
Oral history interview with Calvin N. Mooers and Charlotte D. Mooersat the
Charles Babbage Institute
The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...
. Interview discusses information retrieval and programming language research from World War II through the early 1990s.
Computer architecture statements
Empirical laws
Eponyms
Information retrieval evaluation