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“Tell them it's easy”: Framing incentives in learning basic statistical problems

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  • Bizon, Wojciech

Abstract

Learning quantitative subjects is perceived as a difficult process; congruently, students are often concerned about academic courses involving statistics. Simultaneously, there are a number of tools in psychology and behavioral economics, i.e. framing stimuli, which can increase the efficiency of knowledge transfer processes and level of solving new problems in a simple manner. During a basic statistics test on a group of 284 economics students, it was shown that the method of informing students that a specific problem was very simple, increased their efficiency to solve problems, compared to those who were informed that the problem was very difficult. Using 4 × 2 ANCOVA, with the level of prior knowledge in statistics as the covariant and including gender analysis into the homogeneity-of-slopes model, it was also revealed that the impact of individual framing stimuli is universal and does not depend on the level of prior knowledge of statistics.

Suggested Citation

  • Bizon, Wojciech, 2018. "“Tell them it's easy”: Framing incentives in learning basic statistical problems," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 76(C), pages 76-81.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:soceco:v:76:y:2018:i:c:p:76-81
    DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2018.08.001
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