Improving statistical reasoning

Peter Sedlmeier

Improving Statistical Reasoning presents new studies of how people think and act on probabilistic information, focusing on the details of how statistical reasoning works and on training programs that can exploit people's natural cognitive capabilities to improve their statistical reasoning. Training programs that take into account findings from evolutionary psychology and instructional theory are shown to have substantially larger effects that are more stable over time than previous training regimens. The theoretical implications of the work are presented in a neural network model of human performance on statistical reasoning problems. This book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of judgment and decision making and cognitive science, and to teachers of statistics and probabilistic reasoning.