The Research Design Associates Blog

We routinely work with brilliant scientists, business leaders, legal adjudicators and policy decision makers of all ages and experiences. Yet these very competent folks rarely use the results of probability statistics as primary components in their decision making. They mostly substitute some form of intuitive math, “experience” or “judgment”. During political campaigns it is always frustrating to hear distorted or down right fabricated numbers being used to bolster one candidate or another. It just makes sense to disregard numbers jumble in situations where there is little capacity to easily verify or grasp truth about what the numbers mean. The tendency to disregard all politician’s’ numbers as lies throws out the baby with the bath, it is completely understandable.  Yet scientists, economists and business decision makers ought to be able to use probability to sort out fact from fiction in the fields where they are expert. But there is little evidence that these probability based judgments are routinely used in any field.