Economics revolves around a central character: “economic man.” As historians, we are all familiar with various episodes in the history of this character, and we appreciate his ever-changing aspect even while many of our colleagues in economics think the rational economic agent of neoclassical economics is the same kind of person as Adam Smith’s economic man. The fact that this is a familiar his...

This review considers experimental research that has used probability theory and statistics as a framework within which to study human statistical inference. The experiments have investigated estimates of proportions, means, variances, and correlations, both of samples and of populations. In some experiments, parameters of populations were stationary; in others, the parameters changed over time...