Quantum Theory May Explain Wishful Thinking 415
explosivejared writes "Humans don't always make the most rational decisions. As studies have shown, even when logic and reasoning point in one direction, sometimes we chose the opposite route, motivated by personal bias or simply 'wishful thinking.' This paradoxical human behavior has resisted explanation by classical decision theory for over a decade. But now, scientists have shown that a quantum probability model can provide a simple explanation for human decision-making — and may eventually help explain the success of human cognition overall."
Unfortunately I'm a Bit Skeptical (Score:5, Insightful)
Two experimental tasks in psychology, the two-stage gambling game and the Prisoner's Dilemma game, show that people violate the sure thing principle of decision theory. These paradoxical findings have resisted explanation by classical decision theory for over a decade. A quantum probability model, based on a Hilbert space representation and Schrodinger's equation, provides a simple and elegant explanation for this behaviour. The quantum model is compared with an equivalent Markov model and it is shown that the latter is unable to account for violations of the sure thing principle. Accordingly, it is argued that quantum probability provides a better framework for modelling human decision-making.
The human brain is a complex organ. Unfortunately the kind people at the "Royal Society for Articles Only People with Money Can Read" would not allow me to review this research. I would have found this research much more compelling had they reported a much more thorough sample analysis. I'm going to predict that people from different walks of life would respond differently to the Prisoner's Dilemma game. For instance, if you did this on regular citizens with no history of jail time versus convicts serving sentences, I would expect you to have to adapt your model.
Because you encountered some percentage of "wishful thinking" does not necessarily make that a tried and true percentage unless it is true for human beings in different groups that may affect this decision making. If it truly is quantum mechanics at work, I would suspect that you would see the same percentage in convicts vs non-convicts, Russians vs Americans, women vs men, scientists vs priests, orphans vs parented children, etc. For you see, I'm going to make the assumption that people are deciding on wishful thinking based on their history of interacting with other humans.
I'm also noticing a disturbing trend in "quantum mechanics" being spewed whenever we don't understand something. I caution you that people in the future might look back on this and laugh that such crude research could in any way conclude that quantum mechanics is at work. It's almost as if we assume we understand other possible explanation so it must be the one we don't understand very well. We don't understand photosynthesis --> must be quantum mechanics! We don't understand the human mind --> must be quantum mechanics! etc. Am I saying quantum mechanics has nothing to do with these things? No. I'm just saying I have seen no conclusive proof.
Free will and the brain (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not, however, convinced that we have to discard determinism in this case. The article says that humans don't always make the most rational decisions, even when logic and reasoning point in one direction.
The thing is, no decision is made in a vaccuum. For an adult, each new decision carries the weight of millions of old decisions and their results as inputs. Who knows what combination of life experiences and consequences shape a new decision the most?
The rationality of the decision might be a smaller input than the fact that a similar decision in the past REALLY went wrong for some reason.
Physic != Psychology (Score:1, Insightful)
People are stupid. (Score:4, Insightful)
That seems a much simpler explanation.
Especially when I see contestants on Deal or No Deal who turn-down $50,000 "banker payoffs" and end-up with only $100 or less in their cases. Pure logic dictates that your odds of winning the big prize is almost nothing, and you should take the banker payoff, but people don't use logic. They use emotion. They "feel" their way through life instead of thinking.
Re:Unfortunately I'm a Bit Skeptical (Score:3, Insightful)
Must concur. That the Prisoner's Dilemma could be influenced by a persons:
* Irrational and rational fear of prison (what movies have they recently seen?)
* Experience with the trustworthiness of others.
* Complete lack of understanding of probability despite having it explained to them by people who intrinsically "get it."
Seems pretty obvious to me. That these scientists aren't in-touch with the emotion driven, whimsical side of human cognition is probably because they "don't get invited to those kinds of parties."
Magical quantum mechanical fairy dust (Score:5, Insightful)
It's all well and good to use the mathematical techniques of quantum mechanics in other fields but the math by itself is not quantum theory. I get really annoyed with the "Ohhh something weird and mysterious we don't understand it must be because of QM" nonsense. Hello, decoherence anyone? Outside of carefully prepared states, large collections of particles behave classically. You know, that's why we discovered classical physics first.
Re:Classical Decision Theory *does*... (Score:4, Insightful)
Classical decision Theory *does* account for human's decision making. "Personal bias" (aka values) are very much accounted for.
Yeah the summary (obviously didn't RTFA) is dumb. Adding to your point, wishful thinking IS decision making!!! If x is a sure thing, but there is a glimmer of hope for 10x, then you will probably have a proportional amount of people attempt for 10x, even though the failure rate is high.
Ask any restaurant manager in NY or LA about the availability of waitresses to see this demonstrated in the real world.
Re:Unfortunately I'm a Bit Skeptical (Score:3, Insightful)
Luminiferous Aether (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Free will and the brain (Score:5, Insightful)
How would free will be explained on the quantum level? Randomness or probability doesn't account for free will, either. Free will is simply magic of the mind, a sort of god-of-the-gaps for not knowing the complex web of the interaction between heredity and environment and the many antecedent events acting upon it.
...and Wishful Thinking may explain Quantum theory (Score:3, Insightful)
Obligitory XKCD comic [xkcd.com]
The all-enveloping philosophical uncertainty of the human mind, and the uncertainty of quantum theory may describe similar things, and the statistics may even appear to match human decision making - but I'll paraphrase the classic line and say correlated statistics don't imply an actual relationship.
Just like you can have rather startling symmetry between two structures in different creatures (convergent symmetry/evolution), when they were developed in drastically different ways (but facing the same need/phenomenon), the uncertainty in the human condition is based on our need to model the world in a quick and dirty manner. We need a way to model the ocean of unknown that houses our tiny plankton of knowledge.
The uncertainty in quantum theory always seemed different as I understand it. It's unresolved variables, waveforms that haven't collapsed. Human minds may function with some electromagnetism, but decisions tend to be made on a larger scale than quantum uncertainty is going to have a large role in changing.
That's a risk with quantum/string theories - they simplify the way we can view the world, in a way that can often conform with observation, but they still aren't a description of the world we actually live in. The simplicity and accuracy in some places is captivating, but they don't and shouldn't take the place of direct observation. We should NOT expect to get a special understanding of, for instance, the human mental state from theories on such phenomena we can only model but not test. It could happen - but this doesn't seem a valid path to connecting the two.
Ryan Fenton
Re:Unfortunately I'm a Bit Skeptical (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>I'm going to make the assumption that people are deciding on wishful thinking based on their history of interacting with other humans.
You make a really good point here. When I started on Ebay circa 2002 I trusted people to be fair and honest, like me. Now many years later after being burned multiple times, I don't trust anybody. I assume they are going to find some way to scam me, whether it's directly (credit chargeback) or indirectly (unfair negatives harming my future sales)*. I still have the same brain as seven years ago, but what's changed is my "history of interacting with other humans" and that affects my choices. I'm sure you're right: A convict is less-likely to choose the "trust others" option than the average person, and more-likely to choose the immediate payoff per the traditional Game Theory.
And no quantum mechanics does not apply to this research. Quantum mechanics is not random; it's predictable and understandable.
*
* Example - a buyer once negged me because the postman ran over the package with his truck. How is this in any way my fault? Stupid idiot. More recently, a seller sold me a laptop with spilled soda on it, and then refused to refund claiming it was "as is". Sorry but that doesn't excuse selling junk; U.S. law requires revealing if equipment is non-operative, especially in mail order where buyers cannot inspect the item. (sigh). You cannot trust anybody on Ebay, either buyers or sellers.
Re:Free will and the brain (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:coincidence (Score:5, Insightful)
Technically, an arbitrary physical process (like the functioning of the brain) is based on smaller-scale subprocesses that eventually boil down to quantum-scale interactions.
To claim that this implies that quantum-mechanical behavior would be evident in the larger-scale process shows a misunderstanding of the physics.
Re:Unfortunately I'm a Bit Skeptical (Score:5, Insightful)
You're correct that the main thrust of the linked article is just the application of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics to cognition and game theory. However, the end of the article does have some speculation about whether there could be some more literally quantum-mechanical basis for human cognition. Seems like complete B.S. to me, but it is there in the article.
There's a long history of people trying to apply quantum-mechanical concepts to all kinds of things outside physics, from religion to social science. Generally it's all nonsense. In this particular article, they observe some complex cognitive behavior that doesn't fit the kind of utility-optimizing model that's commonly assumed in economics. They (a) try to explain this using cognitive dissonance, and (b) come up with a novel application of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics for modeling cognitive dissonance. IMO, the B.S. sets in at step a. There are lots of reasons the people in the study could be behaving in this particular way, and cognitive dissonance is only one of them.
In the prisoner's dilemma situation they describe, a long-term strategy that's often evolutionarily successful is tit-for-tat, in which you defect if your opponent's last choice was defection, and play honestly if their last choice was to play honestly. Tit-for-tat is arguably sort of programmed into the human psyche, as an evolved mechanism for making social animals succeed in groups. From that point of view, the question is why these people so often chose not to follow tit-for-tat, often choosing to defect even if their partner had played honestly in the first round.
I can think of at least two good reasons that are just as plausible (and probably just as impossible to test scientifically) as the authors'. One is that the people in this study go through the first round playing honestly, and then in the second round they tend to say, "Participating in this study is boring. I'm hungry for lunch. Maybe I'll make it more fun by doing the opposite choice the second time around. It would be less boring to try each choice at least once." Another possibility is that they imagine the psychodrama of the situation and find it emotionally rewarding. They imagine telling their friends afterwards, "Ha ha, that poor shmuck! I played him like a trout. First I lured him in by being honest in the first round, and then I dropped the bomb on him the second time around. He didn't even know what hit him."
Both of these explanations would be considered irrational by a classical economist, which means exactly nothing. Maybe it's perfectly rational to entertain yourself, or to set up a good story to entertain your friends with.
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why is defection considered rational? (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no prison player. That's the point of the game. The prisoners only care about their jail time.
Simple truth (Score:3, Insightful)
It all comes down to this: People always do what they think will make them happy.
Considering how quantum processes might effect mental decisions is a rather intriguing notion, but it isn't likely to have practical value in understanding human nature.
Re:People are stupid. (Score:4, Insightful)
We probably don't need an elaborate quantum theory to explain this behavior, but we might want to have it in order to predict behavior we haven't observed.
Wouldn't it be neat if we had a set of behavioral models that could predict how people would act in the aggregate for any arbitrary game?
Maybe that's not possible, but that shouldn't keep us from trying to do it.
Re:Unfortunately I'm a Bit Skeptical (Score:3, Insightful)
Example: You have a problem with the computer. Something does not work. A file won't delete, a network share is not accessable, whatever. What would you do? You would take rational steps to narrow down the problem. You would check cables, you would check permissions, you would ping the machine, you would, in short, eliminate the possible error sources one by one.
I've had my share of tech support. What does the non-savvy person usually do?
1) Reboot.
2) Do the same thing again and again, hoping for a different result.
3) Close the program used to open the file (explorer, word processor, whatever) and reopen it.
4) Disconnect and reconnect various devices, from network cable to mouse
All that (well, maybe with the exception of the first in case of Windows machines) is in the area of "wishful thinking". Especially number 2 is very common and, from the point of an engineer who kinda knows that machines cannot create different results with identical input, stupid. It is basically wishful thinking. Maybe it works this time.
I disagree that this is just wishful thinking. From the perspective of an end-user, a multi-tasking OS should be treated as non-deterministic. Performing the same operation is NOT guaranteed to produce the same results. Let's take your example of a file that can't be deleted. Sometimes, this is because a background process is accessing the file or has it locked for some reason. Waiting a few seconds then trying again may work in this case. If it still doesn't work, then perhaps the process that locked the file is hung or crashed. Rebooting will often solve this. A more sophisticated approach would be to find out which process has locked the file and then quit or kill that process, but retrying or rebooting is often easier and possibly faster.
As for the "engineer who kinda knows that machines cannot create different results with identical input": I hope that engineer never has to work on a system with concurrent processes (e.g. any modern computer).
Stupid research (Score:3, Insightful)
Two experimental tasks in psychology, the two-stage gambling game and the Prisoner's Dilemma game....
The way people answer the prisoners dillema game has absolutely nothing to do with wishful thinking or not. The whole idea of the game is that "all rational players will play defect, all things being equal." The thing these researches are forgetting is the last part - all things being equal. All things are NEVER equal when playing the game - because anyone who is thinking rationally knows that the person on the other side of the game has just as high odds of themselves behaving irrationally as behaving rationally. Therefore, it really is a total crapshoot if defecting is beneficial to you or not.
The prisoner's dillema is nothing mroe than a logic puzzle, it is not useful to apply in any given case. The only people who would answer consistently in the prisoner's dillema game are psych students - and that is just because they are trying to show off.
Re:The Emperor's New Mind (Score:2, Insightful)
No, he has not. In the _belief_ that our minds can not be simply modelled as machines, he suggested (*) that quantum processes (wave function collapse, IIRC) are what give us consciousness, free will and all the goodies that make some believe we are so especial. This article has nothing to do with this, they just happened to use the same maths to solve a totally unrelated problem.
(*) And pretty randomly, I should say. It reminded me of radioactivity; you know, like all that bunch of superheroes whose powers come from some random mishap involving some radioactive material .
"Prisoner's Dilemma" != Prison (Score:5, Insightful)
..fear of prison..
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a generalized model for decision-making in a non-zero-sum game (net cooperation must yield more than net defection.) A story involving prisoner's and jail time is only the most popular canonical representation for the game. While I've nothing to say in defense of the researchers' intelligence: to levy criticism that the researchers have perhaps overlooked subjects' aversion to actual prison time is to suggest that the researchers are, perhaps, extremely stupid, and have no idea what they are doing at all.
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're assuming a woman that needs to fight for power. An already empowered woman thinks much like a man but with a more social perspective, with no deception because that kills social relationships. An empowered woman is really a treat to converse with and to know.
How do you find an empowered woman? My advice would be to stop treating women like alien creatures and assuming they're always trying to deceive you.
We're a superposition, of course. (Score:3, Insightful)
My first reaction on reading this article? Of *course* quantum theory is closer to human thought than Markov modelling.
Markov theory (assuming I understand it correctly) involves discrete separable states with transient (but still separable) intermediate states. Quantum mechanics involves superpositioned states -- states that are not separable, of which several can exist at the same time.
Have you ever felt angry and sad at the same time? Happy and excited? Hungry and in pain? The human brain doesn't do discrete, separable emotional states. We're always some superposition of emotions, thoughts, and needs.
As for wishful thinking, it's a state of hoping for one outcome while being mentally prepared for its opposite. Wishful thinking is, by definition, a superposition of mental states. Of course QM describes it better.
When you think about it, this entire line of research deserves one big 'Duh'. But then, I suppose most great insights seem obvious after they've been discovered.
Re:In other news... (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really....most of them really are that way. You really can't ever trust them 100%. Some are better than others, but, you always have to be cautious when dealing with them.
They may say they love you and you are the most important thing, but, you are not. Their financial stability and care of their kids will always outweigh you as their man.
It has been said that women have it made. They have half the money and ALL the pussy.
With the latter, they can get another many to replace you in no time at all. They may be more generally emotional creatures, but, they can turn it all off in a snap too. Guys seem to have the opposite problem, they take awhile to let the shields down, but, after they do...the pretty much lose it if their woman leaves them. That's why you so often see the obsessional behavior of a dumped guy. You rarely see that as much from the womans point of view.
Of course, there are always exceptions and outliers to the rule.
The trick is...as a guy, never let yourself totally go, and never trust them all the way. If you do, YOU lose the dominant role, and you are open to really getting fscked both emotionally, and financially.
Men just won't admit when they're outsmarted (Score:3, Insightful)
Women think that they have more bargaining power than men, and that they can wield this power more effectively by pretending they don't realize they have it. Women are correct in their thinking.
Re:Unfortunately I'm a Bit Skeptical (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Your entire post leads right back to the very comment you replied to: "Man are you hanging out with the wrong women".
You said yourself that there are exceptions and outliers to the rule. The thing is, they're far more common than you, like most men, realize. If you act the way you described, you'll be less likely to find them.
You see, for the most part, you have to be the person you want to meet. Like-minded people do tend to find each other. If you want a straight shooter, be a straight shooter. If you play games, don't be surprised if you end up with someone who plays games as well. If you never let yourself totally go, never trust them all the way, and attempt to be dominant — you will end up with someone who never lets herself totally go, never trusts you all the way, and attempts to be dominant.
Re:In other news... (Score:3, Insightful)
All women grow up with a vagina. That leads to a PROFOUNDLY different experience than any man experiences. Even putting aside physiological differences between the sexes, which I think have major effects on behavior, the fact is that nearly every encounter with another human being from the youngest age on up is significantly altered by the gender of the participants. People can't help but be significantly affected by this. This isn't really good or bad; it's human nature. A certain amount of coercive or deceptive (or indirect, tantalizing, whatever you want to call it) behavior is a natural consequence of the type and nature of gifts that women possess. Men learn different techniques.
(This may sound misogynistic, and I don't mean it to. This has as much to do with men's reaction to women as it has to do with women themselves.)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
The previous posters aren't sad individuals
It is sad to lose your humanity. There is more to life than logic and what you think you "know" based on your limited perspective of the world. Love and you will know love. Do not and you will not. It's that simple.
they've simply ... presented our existence in terms that can be explained via the same paradigms that we explain the rest of the animal world.
Well, the same paradigms that you use to describe the animal world, anyway... as if any of our behavioral sciences are more than (very useful) vague abstractions. There's much more to know about life than what our sciences can currently gain a perspective on.
I am afraid I am speaking with people who have already closed their minds to the possibility that what they do not/cannot understand with logic must inherently not exist or be explainable with something besides logic.
Re:In other news... (Score:3, Insightful)
Subjective.
Re:Unfortunately I'm a Bit Skeptical (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:People are stupid. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why was parent modded "Insightful"?
What's so non-obvious about people being stupid? That's not the point. Science isn't about proving people stupid, it's about proving how stupidity works. "People are stupid" doesn't explain anything, it's just a killer phrase.
Re:In other news... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think you and cromar are at best tangentially dealing with the same issues. There is a difference between having boundaries and not being able to trust someone. On the one hand, you are right that if a guy acts like a slave at a woman's beck and call she won't respect him, and women usually leave guys they don't respect. On the other hand, being too afriad to trust a woman with your thoughts and feelings has similar results, the process will just take longer.
MOD UP!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
I hereby nominate you for the "funniest-very-short-reply-to-a-very-long-rambling" trophy.
Re:In other news... (Score:3, Insightful)
The same load of bull as the post you're replying to.
The truth is that there are NO RULES in relationships. And human beings are different.
And NO, you don't have to be the same person you want to meet.
All you can do - is understand what you want, set your standards and go searching the person you will feel satisfied with and who will accept you the same way. Everything else just doesn't work.