“Tell them it's easy”: Framing incentives in learning basic statistical problems

Learning quantitative subjects is perceived as a difficult process; congruently, students are often concerned about academic courses involving statistics. Simultaneously, there are a number of tools in psychology and behavioral economics, i.e. framing stimuli, which can increase the efficiency of knowledge transfer processes and level of solving new problems in a simple manner. During a basic statistics test on a group of 284 economics students, it was shown that the method of informing students that a specific problem was very simple, increased their efficiency to solve problems, compared to those who were informed that the problem was very difficult. Using 4 × 2 ANCOVA, with the level of prior knowledge in statistics as the covariant and including gender analysis into the homogeneity-of-slopes model, it was also revealed that the impact of individual framing stimuli is universal and does not depend on the level of prior knowledge of statistics.