On These Math Problems, Smarter People Do Worse

there is this research paper that has been on my mind for years it shows that there is a particular type of problem where the smarter you are the more likely you are to get it wrong so I asked my American friend Wy to go out on the street and ask people the questions from the study to see if we could replicate its findings the first question in the paper is about a fictitious study on skin cream so in this madeup study people with skin rashes are assigned to eat did the experimental group where they use a new cream for 2 weeks or the control group where they use no cream for that same period and at the end they count up how many rashes improved and how many got worse in each treatment group the results are summarized in this table so the question study participants were asked was did the skin cream make the rash better or did it make it worse the question is a little tricky because it requires proportional reasoning I think better better so what what are you looking at just real quick I'm I'll be honest I'm just looking at how big the numbers are if you just look for the biggest number well that is the group who used the skin cream and the rash improved so this number is bigger than this number yeah yeah so you might conclude that the cream worked it makes rashes better that is the intuitive answer but if you look more carefully at the data and use proportional reasoning you realize that in the experimental cream group about three times as many people got better as got worse but in the control group around five times as many people got better than worse so using no cream your rash was significantly more likely to improve in fact it's a fair conclusion to say that the cream on average made rashes worse the lead author on this study was Dan Kahan I'm studying the science of science communication he and colleag recruited a nationally diverse sample of 1,111 Americans to participate but before answering the question on skin cream each participant was asked a series of questions to assess their numeracy a numeracy it's not so much the capacity to use complicated mathematics but really to reason well about quantitative information numeracy ...