The psychology of Bayesian reasoning

The Impact of Visualizing Nested Sets. An Empirical Study on Tree Diagrams and Unit Squares

“…Although the tree diagram is a common visualization of Bayesian reasoning situations or rather, repeated random events in statistics and statistics education (e.g., De Veaux et al, 2012) and many scholars use tree diagrams in their research papers to represent Bayesian reasoning situations (Gigerenzer and Hoffrage, 1995; Mandel, 2014; Navarrete et al, 2014), there are some hints in the literature suggesting that the tree diagram is not an ideal graphical nested-set representation. In an experiment based on probability and frequency instruction, the roulette-wheel diagram outperformed the tree diagram.…”

Assessing Probabilistic Reasoning in Verbal-Numerical and Graphical-Pictorial Formats: An Evaluation of the Psychometric Properties of an Instrument

“…The debate about this theme is strong in literature. Indeed, also when it seems recognised the effect of graphical facilitation, it is not clear what are the factors that could affect the application of probabilistic reasoning, enhancing the performance (Brase & Hill, 2015;Mandel, 2014;Moro & Bodanza, 2010).…”

“…To create the problems, we first identified basic aspects of probabilistic reasoning, referring to simple and conditional probability, as stated by many authors in the typical works on this topic (Brase, 2009;Ben-Zvi & Garfield, 2004;Garfield & Ben-Zvi, 2008;Mandel, 2014;Moro & Bodanza, 2010). Specifically our items referred to the core domain of probability introduced by Moore (1990), which identified the basic probabilistic concepts developed, from the early grades of school, for the evaluation of the chance.…”

“…Probabilistic reasoning is a crucial aspect when using mathematics and statistics Bayesian reasoning have been considered in literature as a useful type of tasks in order to evaluate the features of some kind of statistical reasoning (Brase, 2009;Brase & Hill, 2015;Mandel, 2014). DelMas (2004) analysed in a deep way the features of statistical and mathematical reasoning, in order to shed light on the main characteristics of human reasoning.…”

Beyond the status-quo: research on Bayesian reasoning must develop in both theory and method

“…Whilst the question of how best to assist people to make such judgments remains in critical need of research (e.g., Navarrete et al, 2014 ), this paper considers how extant research on Bayesian facilitation has been somewhat constrained by both theoretical, and methodological status-quos. As Mandel ( 2014 ) notes, in more general terms we still know relatively little about “what it is to ‘be Bayesian’,” which has clear implications for our understanding of “what works and why” in Bayesian intervention. This paper contemplates several suggestions as to how research may improve its pursuit of this goal, including the deconstructing of Bayesian reasoning into component tasks, and the leveraging of more process-oriented measures to further integrate burgeoning findings concerning individual cognitive differences.…”