Abstract:

Since antiquity, numbers, quantification, and accounting have been used to perform the control function of management and to support related decisions. It was necessary for this service that mathematics - as a discipline dealing with numbers - should be introduced into education, and it has remained to the present day. While we have tried to explain almost every decision by some level of quantification - as we saw during the pandemic -, we forget that the interpretation of these numbers is key to the decision-making process. Our relationship to numbers is determined by the psychological phenomena associated with them (think of anchoring, for example) and by our own experience. These experiences are mostly generated during mathematics education. Mathematics is the subject that students typically study the longest, on a compulsory basis, so we have no choice whether it is part of our lives. My research, using a sample of nearly 650 people, seeks to investigate how our relationship with mathematics changes over the years of education and how this affects our perception of ourselves as emotional rather than rational decision-makers. What is clear is that in early childhood our connection to numbers is successful, playful. However, this changes very quickly, with the result that by the time we become adults there is a general perception that there are emotional thinkers and rational thinkers but both generally think: “I have no math brain”.

Keywords:

Mathematical education, decision making, quantification, rationality, sustainability.