Statistics and Common Sense

Abstract

Common sense is a dynamic concept and it is natural that our (statistical) common sense lags behind the development of statistical science. What is not so easy to understand is why common sense lags behind as much as it does. We conduct a survey among Japanese students and provide examples and tentative explanations of a number of statistical questions where common sense and statistical science diverge. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Keywords:

• Common knowledge
• Experiment
• Probability
• Statistical methods

Supplementary Materials

The original data and replication files are included as supplementary materials, consisting of the following five files: Readme.pdf (instruction document), HMY_CodeBook.xlsx (excel codebook), HMY_Data_May2022. xlsx (dataset), HMY_Data.dta (STATA dataset), and HMY_do.do (replication file).

Acknowledgments

We thank the editor, associate editor, and two referees for their constructive comments, and Jan van Maanen, Steven Tijms, and Aad van der Vaart for illuminating discussions.

Additional information

Funding

Financial support was received from grant-in-aid for scientific research (KAKENHI, grant number: 20H05631) of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and from the Joint Usage/Research Center at ISER, Osaka University. The survey was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University.