BELIEF IN THE LAW OF SMALL NUMBERS

People have erroneous intuitions about the laws of chance. In particular, they regard a sample randomly drawn from a population as highly representative, that is, similar to the population in all essential characteristics. The prevalence of the belief and its unfortunate consequence for psychological research are illustrated by the responses of professional psychologists to a questionnaire concerning research decisions.

• Publication year

  1971

• Venue

  Pediatrics

• Publication date

  1971-08-01

• Fields of study

  Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1037/H0031322
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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