Intuitions about sample size: the empirical law of large numbers
✍ Scribed by Peter Sedlmeier; Gerd Gigerenzer
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 215 KB
- Volume
- 10
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0894-3257
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
According to Jacob Bernoulli, even the stupidest man' knows that the larger one's sample of observations, the more con®dence one can have in being close to the truth about the phenomenon observed. Two-and-a-half centuries later, psychologists empirically tested people's intuitions about sample size. One group of such studies found participants attentive to sample size; another found participants ignoring it. We suggest an explanation for a substantial part of these inconsistent ®ndings. We propose the hypothesis that human intuition conforms to the empirical law of large numbers' and distinguish between two kinds of tasks Ð one that can be solved by this intuition (frequency distributions) and one for which it is not sucient (sampling distributions). A review of the literature reveals that this distinction can explain a substantial part of the apparently inconsistent results. *