ABSTRACT

This book focuses on 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 are traced in a neural network model of human performance on statistical reasoning problems. This book apppeals to judgment and decision making researchers and other cognitive scientists, as well as to teachers of statistics and probabilistic reasoning.

chapter 1|28 pages

Statistical Reasoning: How Good Are We?

chapter 3|19 pages

Prior Training Studies

chapter 5|13 pages

Conjunctive-Probability Training

chapter 6|12 pages

Conditional-Probability Training

chapter 7|13 pages

Bayesian-Inference Training I

chapter 8|6 pages

Bayesian-Inference Training II

chapter 9|10 pages

Sample-Size Training I

chapter 10|7 pages

A Flexible Urn Model

chapter 11|12 pages

Sample-Size Training II

chapter 12|10 pages

Implications of Training Results

chapter 14|24 pages

The PASS Model

chapter 15|9 pages

Statistical Reasoning: A New Perspective