Struggle With Statistics? Your 'Fixed Mindset' Might Be To Blame

A new study in Frontiers in Psychology examined why people struggle so much to solve statistical problems, particularly why we show a marked preference for complicated solutions over simpler, more intuitive ones. Chalk it up to our resistance to change. From a report: The study concluded that fixed mindsets are to blame: we tend to stick with the familiar methods we learned in school, blinding us to the existence of a simpler solution. Roughly 96 percent of the general population struggles with solving problems relating to statistics and probability. Yet being a well-informed citizen in the 21st century requires us to be able to engage competently with these kinds of tasks, even if we don't encounter them in a professional setting. 'As soon as you pick up a newspaper, you're confronted with so many numbers and statistics that you need to interpret correctly,' says co-author Patrick Weber, a graduate student in math education at the University of Regensburg in Germany. Most of us fall far short of the mark. Part of the problem is the counterintuitive way in which such problems are typically presented. Meadows presented his evidence in the so-called 'natural frequency format' (for example, 1 in 10 people), rather than in terms of a percentage (10 percent of the population). That was a smart decision, since 1-in-10 a more intuitive, jury-friendly approach. Recent studies have shown that performance rates on many statistical tasks increased from four percent to 24 percent when the problems were presented using the natural frequency format.

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