“Belief in the Law of Small Numbers” teased out the implications of a single mental error that people commonly made—even when those people were trained statisticians. People mistook even a very small part of a thing for the whole. Even statisticians tended to leap to conclusions from inconclusively small amounts of evidence. They did this, Amos and Danny argued, because they believed—even if they did not acknowledge the belief—that any given sample of a large population was more representative of that population than it actually was.
