WORK
The Adult Math Project
Lave's 1984 study of grocery shoppers in Orange County that produced one of the most consequential empirical findings in the history of cognitive research: 98% accuracy in the aisles, 59% on paper — the same people, the same mathematics, radically different performance.
The Adult Math Project was the empirical study that gave Lave's theoretical framework its most devastating evidence. Conducted in the early 1980s among thirty-five adult shoppers in Orange County, California, the study observed the same individuals performing arithmetic in two settings: in the supermarket, where they calculated prices and compared unit costs as part of their normal shopping routine; and in a formal testing environment, where they solved mathematically identical problems stripped of their practical context. The results were not subtle. The gap between in-context performance (approaching 98%) and out-of-context performance (around 59%) held across ages, educational backgrounds, and mathematical confidence levels. People who considered themselves "bad at math" and who performed poorly on paper were virtuosos in the aisles.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The study's design was deceptively simple but methodologically innovative. Rather than relying on laboratory experiments or self-report, Lave and her team