Probabilistic reasoning is not dependent on education

Nature : The extent to which human understanding of probability is innate has been extensively debated. In a new study, Vittorio Girotto of the University IUAV in Venice, Italy, and his colleagues attempted to clarify the issue by comparing the probabilistic reasoning abilities of formally educated adults with those who had received no formal education. Regardless of education level, the subjects were found to be equally capable of predicting that blue would be the most likely color of chip to be pulled out of a basket containing three blue chips and one green chip. Both groups also correctly predicted that a red shape was the most likely to be drawn from a mix of four red squares, three green circles, and one red circle, and they all updated their prediction to green when told that the shape being drawn was a circle. Both groups were also equally successful when betting whether two tokens drawn from a mixed collection would be the same color. Girotto’s team believes that the way problems are presented to people can affect how successful they are at predicting the outcomes. Whereas written problems were used in earlier studies claiming that people showed no inherent ability with probabilities, Girotto and colleagues used visual tests. Girotto also notes that because he and his team did not take advanced reasoning into account, the results should not be overly generalized.