In a new World Bank working paper, Bilal Zia and his coauthors study how insights from the biology of the human mind can help to better understand and facilitate learning of key development concepts, especially among illiterate populations in poor countries. To make people experience- rather than learning- the concept of probability, the researchers played a simple dice game in rural South Africa in a RCT involving 840 individuals. In the game each player started with one die and rolled till she got a six, then she was handed two dice and rolled till she got two sixes which on average took her much longer. Depending on how fast players were able to roll two sixes, they could reflect and update their beliefs about winning odds. Afterwards, players were told that winning the lotto would be equivalent to them rolling all sixes on nine dice. Read the complete blog post.
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