Dr Ellen Peters visits this week to give a presentation in the SWE Colloquia series. Dr. Peters is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Director of the Decision Sciences Collaborative, Professor of Medicine in the Department of Internal Medicine (by courtesy), and Professor of Marketing & Logistics at the Fisher College of Business (by courtesy) at The Ohio State University.

Innumeracy in the lab and in the wild: A focus on efficacy and action with numbers

Research has demonstrated the importance of objective numeracy (defined as the ability to understand and use probabilistic and other mathematical concepts) to judgments and decisions in the lab and in life.  However, not everybody can understand and use numeric information effectively. In addition, researchers have largely ignored the potentially motivating power of numeric self-efficacy, independent of objective numeracy. In this talk, I’ll introduce: 1) the extent of innumeracy, 2) why these differences matter, and 3) how objective numeracy and subjective numeracy (numeric self-efficacy) relate to numeric persistence and life outcomes. Objective numeracy and numeric efficacy capture distinct psychological construct important to judgments and decisions.