Variations of cognitive biases in problem situations involving uncertainty: an analysis of differences between groups
Abstract
This study investigates whether biases present in informal statistical cognition are similar between professionals working at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and a non-randomized comparison group in the population. Five hundred and twelve participants answered an online questionnaire with registration items and situations involving probability, risk, uncertainty, or ambivalence. Three hundred thirty cases returned the questionnaire with more than 50% of the items answered, being 85 linked to the IBGE and 245 from the non-casual comparison group. The results revealed that the biases are not distributed in a generalized way, as predicted in the literature, the variable “currently working with statistics” may have significantly less bias. However, the low associated value of R² suggests further investigations considering random clusters.
Keywords
Decision Making, Heuristics, Uncertainty, BiasReferences
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