Recently there has been a trend towards admitting expert statistical evidence in UK court cases. There have been a number of cases, however, in which outcomes have been distorted by statistical or probabilistic misconceptions and by faulty inference. Typically, lawyers receive no training in these areas apart from their compulsory school mathematical education. In this study, data was taken from five groups of trainee lawyers. This demonstrated that they made errors in assessing likelihoods, irrespective of the level and type of mthematical education that they have received. The typical approaches and content of mathematical education at school or college need to be re-considered. Data from two other groups of subjects (one of statistical educators) with different types of mathematical backgrounds were available for comparison purposes.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education