Humankind was slow to discover mathematical probability. The delay was
so striking that Hacking (1975) called it a “scandal of philosophy”
dating its emergence to 1654, when Blaise Pascal and Pierre Fermat exchanged
letters on gambling problems. Psychologists were equally slow. Since the
19th century, significant figures such as Wilhelm Wundt had debated the
relationship between intuition and logic, but overlooked probability. It
was not until the 1950s and 60s that psychologists began studying statis-
tical intuitions.
The first systematic investigation was conducted by Swiss psycholo-
gists Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder in
The Origin of the Idea of Chance in Children
They presented children of various ages with
random devices and concluded that by age 12, children’s intuitions begin
to align with the laws of probability. For instance, children understand
the law of large numbers and, by age eight, the conjunction rule (Inhelder
and Piaget 1964). Around the same time, Egon Brunswik (1955) at the Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley, envisioned the perceptual system as an in-
tuitive statistician, one that calculates correlations and multiple regres-sions.
At the University of Michigan, Ward Edwards (1962, 1968), often re-
ferred to as the founder of behavioral decision theory, compared people’s
judgments with Bayes’ rule and found that people are generally good
Bayesians
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