Whether we are pleased or not, statistics is present in our everyday lives. Paradoxically, the skills to understand statistics seem to be lacking, so that people claim statistics has to become part of the basic skills of every citizen (statistical literacy). But many obstacles appear on the acquisition to these skills on an educational level: for example, numerous studies identified several emotional or cognitive barriers. But these studies adopt the teacher or researcher's point of view; only a few exist questioning the students' representation of statistics. This is the general objective of this present research. After characterizing what a social representation is and pointing out that "statistics is what is given as statistics", a survey was conducted in France with 614 students from different sections in Humanities and Social Sciences. It exudes a score of words reflecting the statistics, such as mathematics, percentages, numbers and calculations. However beyond these terms, there are differences between the sections about the words which are used to characterize statistics: for some, a few words equate statistics (subject) with statistics (numbers and indexes); for others, statistics is conceived as mathematics practiced in research and surveys. Other words are distinguished either by the proximity of the statistical methodology in the questionnaire, either by professional use: the reference to mathematics is then significantly reduced. New aspects of study emerge from these results in research (longitudinal study of the social representation of statistics), in pedagogy (conditions for problematization) and in relation to knowledge (thêmata). This present research invites educators or education researchers to put their own representation by aside and to consider the learners' point of view, potentially different: beside numbers, there are also human beings.
