Tversky and Kahneman

[mark.wilcox@cranfield.ac.uk]

Dear Denziens
I am currently running a research project on predictive performance here in the UK.  The work is premised on Shewhart's work but as always with these things we have been led down several divergent paths.  In true Socratic fashion "We must follow the argument wherever it leads".  Initially we took a Baysien perspective for how people interpret charts and we were quite happy with this till someone pointed us in the direction of Tversky and Kahneman's work on decsision making.  For those not familiar with this field of study they did some ground breaking work over 30 years ago to demonstrate how the public at large dont understand probability theory, sampling theory, predictions and so -on and so-on.  There results are quite alarming and I have tried the simple tests in class with students and got similar results.

My question to the DEN is this.  If people dont understand the basics of maths and statistics (even experienced researchers made the same mistakes) then how does the simple control chart improve the interpretation of data?

I would like to know if anyone has done any work in the decision making field vis-a-vis using control charts?

Thanks in advance
Dr Mark Wilcox
Centre for Business Performance
Cranfield School of Management 
UK
   

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