Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In the current research, we investigated whether numeracy,scientific reports in the popular press, and personal experiencewere associated with people’s data-based decision making.We collected data from English-speaking adult participants(N = 187), residing in the United States and Canada, whowere recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk andcompleted the online study. Results showed that participantswith higher numeracy were more likely to make the correctdata-based decision. However, participants used theirnumeracy selectively. They seemed to use their numeracyskills to confirm their own desire rather than to objectivelyevaluate the data or confirm reported scientific findings. Nosignificant association was found between personalexperience and data-based decision making. Future researchmay examine decision making across other, general-lifedomains to examine the replicability of the current results.