The ‘ Matthew effect’ is a term that was first used by the sociologist Robert K. Merton in an article published in Science in 1968. Although at first it alluded to the phenomenon of the accumulation of goods, wealth or fame (simplified in Percy Shelley’s phrase “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”), its use has spread to other disciplines such as economics, psychology and education.
In the latter area, the term was adopted above all by the psychologist Keith Stanovich to explain the reading and writing disorders that he identified in his research: children who have great reading skills from the beginning accumulate lifetime advantages over children. no This occurs because children who fail to read read less, increasing the gap between them and their peers who have reading skills, who end up reading more.
Thus Stanovich compared material wealth with vocabulary wealth in the field of reading: the rich in words get richer, and the poor in words get poorer , paraphrasing Shelley.
To this is added that, by learning to read better, paying more attention and displaying a greater capacity for understanding, we are able not only to discern what is true or false in the text, but we also add or complete what we read with what we already read. we know in advance (what we have already read in other texts).
The richness of reading
Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out how reading is more productive for the seasoned reader than for the novice with these words: “When the mind is propped up with work and invention, the page of any book we read is illuminated with multiple references. Each phrase is doubly significant ” .
Maryanne Wolf , director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Students and Social Justice at the University of California in Los Angeles, hybridizes the Matthew effect with the words of Emerson in his book Reader, returns home : “ Those who have read a lot and well they will have many resources to apply to what they read ; and those who have not done so will have less to contribute, which, in turn, will give them less basis for inference, deduction and analogical thinking, making them more likely to fall prey to non-verified information, whether it is manipulated information. or completely false ”.
In other words, those who have read little will not know how much they ignore of what they are reading and will also tend to more easily ignore how much they ignore.
A psychological phenomenon that has come to be called the Dunning Kruger Effect . A cognitive bias that is defined as the fact that individuals with little skill or knowledge suffer from an illusory feeling of superiority , considering themselves more intelligent than other more prepared people. That is, incompetence over one’s own incompetence. A bias whose main food is precisely reading little. Read little in the first years of our life and, above all, stop doing it because it is too burdensome a challenge or effort.
