Numeracy, frequency, and Bayesian reasoning
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2009, Vol 4, Issue 1
Abstract
Previous research has demonstrated that Bayesian reasoning performance is improved if uncertainty information is presented as natural frequencies rather than single-event probabilities. A questionnaire study of 342 college students replicated this effect but also found that the performance-boosting benefits of the natural frequency presentation occurred primarily for participants who scored high in numeracy. This finding suggests that even comprehension and manipulation of natural frequencies requires a certain threshold of numeracy abilities, and that the beneficial effects of natural frequency presentation may not be as general as previously believed.
Authors and Affiliations
Gretchen B. Chapman and Jingjing Liu
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677658
- DOI -
- Views 172
- Downloads 0
Risks deter but pleasures allure: Is pleasure more important?
The pursuit of unhealthy behaviors, such as smoking or binge drinking, not only carries various downside risks, but also provides pleasure. A parsimonious model, used in the literature to explain the decision to pursue a...
Susceptibility to anchoring effects: How openness-to-experience influences responses to anchoring cues
Previous research on anchoring has shown this heuristic to be a very robust psychological phenomenon ubiquitous across many domains of human judgment and decision-making. Despite the prevalence of anchoring effects, rese...
It must be awful for them: Perspective and task context affects ratings for health conditions.
When survey respondents rate the quality of life (QoL) associated with a health condition, they must not only evaluate the health condition itself, but must also interpret the meaning of the rating scale in order to assi...
The combined role of task, child’s age and individual differences in understanding decision processes
It is important to understand the impact of individual differences in decision making from childhood to adulthood. This cohort-based study extends our knowledge by comparing decision making of children across the age ran...
Post-error recklessness and the hot hand
Although post-error slowing and the “hot hand” (streaks of good performance) are both types of sequential dependencies arising from the differential influence of success and failure, they have not previously been studied...