Mooers's law is a comment about the use of
information retrieval
Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an Information needs, information need. The information need can be specified in the form ...
systems made by the American
computer scientist
A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science.
Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...
Calvin Mooers 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. 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 th ...
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Cognitive dissonance
In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is described as a mental phenomenon in which people unknowingly hold fundamentally conflicting cognitions. Being confronted by situations that challenge this dissonance may ultimately result in some ...
*
Confirmation bias
Confirmation bias (also confirmatory bias, myside bias, or congeniality bias) is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or Value (ethics and social sciences), val ...
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Satisficing
Satisficing is a decision-making strategy or cognitive heuristic that entails searching through the available alternatives until an acceptability threshold is met, without necessarily maximizing any specific objective. The term ''satisficing'', a ...
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
Eponymous rules
Information retrieval evaluation