A paper prepared for discussion with members of the CMA team interested in Consumer Vulnerability, which led to a presentation as part of the CMA Vulnerability Awareness Week in October 2019

Sometimes, when faced with a maths problem, people experience an emotive response. It’s not unusual to feel a sense of panic or fear when we are trying to work with numbers.

Maths anxiety has been defined in research as the “the panic, helplessness, paralysis, and mental disorganization that arises among some people when they are required to solve a mathematical problem”. (Tobias and Weissbrod. 1980).

A brief thinkpiece drawing the potential parallel between our collective inability to cope with the abundance of calories in the past two decades and our seeming inability to cope with the growing abundance of data…