TLDR just look at this chart: https://journals.sagepub.com/cms/10.1177/01461672231209400/asset/images/large/10.1177_01461672231209400-fig2.jpeg
The choice of paratheses make this paper so hard to read:
“We also find a negative (positive) correlation between cognitive ability and pessimistic (realistic) beliefs”
That’s a common convention in academic papers to demonstrate pairs of correlations, it’s the same as writing
“We also find a positive correlation between cognitive ability and realistic beliefs AND a negative correlation between cognitive ability and pessimistic beliefs.”
I end up reading a lot of academic journals, and the way that they’re written I swear are intentionally obtuse. Sometimes people say “they only seem that way because they are communicating complex ideas”, but when I read papers in my own field I know that that’s not really the case. I once made it three quarters of the way through an article before I realized that all they were doing was slapping a PID on the problem they were defining. You could have written the same article and made it understandable to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the subject but instead they had to make it so obtuse that practitioners in the field would really struggle.
