ABSTRACT
Rest assured the psychological ‘laboratory’ contains none of these things and shouldn’t really involve you in difficult maths. There is the use of statistics for sure, but (a little later on) the author hope to assure you that most basic statistical calculations can be carried out on a phone or cheap calculator, and, anyway, there are computers to do any serious number crunching. With the arrival of text messaging a while back, parents, teachers and the media knowledgeably complained that what they saw as the ugly use of text abbreviations or textisms would have a detrimental effect on the user’s standard of English. Intuition is an even poorer help when issues are much more personal to us. Ritov and Baron asked participants a hypothetical question: ‘Imagine there is a flu epidemic during which your child has a 10 in 10,000 chance of dying.
