Background: We have previously presented two educational interventions aimed to diminish causal illusions and promote critical thinking. In both cases, these interventions reduced causal illusions developed in response to active contingency learning tasks, in which participants were able to decide whether to introduce the potential cause in each…

Recently, researchers have investigated differences in decision making based on description and experience. We address the issue of when experience-based judgments of probability are more accurate than are those based on description. If description is well understood ("transparent") and experience is misleading ("wicked"), it…

Bayesian statistical methodology and its possible uses in the behavioral sciences are discussed in relation to the solution of problems in both the use and teaching of fundamental statistical methods, including confidence intervals, significance tests, and sampling. The Bayesian model explains these statistical methods and offers a consistent…

The testing of research hypotheses is directly comparable to the dichotomous decision-making of medical diagnosis or jury trials--not ill/ill, or innocent/guilty decisions. There are costs in both kinds of error, type I errors of falsely rejecting a null hypothesis or type II errors of falsely rejecting an alternative hypothesis. It is important…