Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Our central question is: how accurate are laypeople’sstatistical intuitions about probability distributions within thedomain of health? Specifically, can participants produceentire probability distributions for the duration of illnesses?While a large body of decision making research has suggestedthat people use a flawed process to arrive at decisions, weposit that participants may be using an optimal process, butwith flawed information. To this end, we assess accuracy interms of both the mean and form of distributions for bothacute illnesses for which people might have experience, andchronic conditions for which people are less likely to haveexperience. We find that participants can accurately estimatethe mean and form of distributions for acute illnesses.