Heuristic Biases in Mathematical Reasoning.

Abstract

In this paper we briefly describe the dual process account of reasoning, and explain the role of heuristic biases in human thought. Concentrating on the so-called matching bias effect, we describe a piece of research that indicates a correlation between success at advanced level mathematics and an ability to override innate and misleading heuristic biases. Implications for the importance of teaching and learning mathematics are discussed. Over the last thirty years psychologists have been very interested in the question of rationality. Do human beings reason according to normative logical rules? Most research answers this question in the negative, and the goal has shifted to explaining why. Recently, dual process theory has attempted to answer this question by positing the existence of heuristic biases: fundamental features of the brain that steer human cognition towards certain computational strategies (Stanovich, 2003). The goal of this paper is to compare how matching bias, one particular heuristic bias, affects successful mathematicians compared to its effect on the general well-educated population.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.