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."
Re:Unfortunately I'm a Bit Skeptical (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure you're looking at this the right way. The abstract does not suppose that this phenomenon results from a quantum physics effect, though I don't know if the research does. Rather, the abstract and the linked article are applying the mathematical models behind quantum theory to problems in cognition. The brain could very well compute these results using classical physics.
Why is defection considered rational? (Score:3, Interesting)
Whenever I read about the (non-repeated) prisoner's dilemma, someone claims that the "rational" choice for either party is to defect, because it yields the highest payoff for one player. This seems to ignore an important point:
The game involves three players - "prisoner one", "prisoner two" and "prison". If the prisoners form a team, it will be better for the team if both of them cooperate. There doesn't have to be any wishful thinking, but simply a goal of doing better for the team. You can never improve the score for the team by defecting.
What is irrational or not always depends on what your goals are.
Re:Unfortunately I'm a Bit Skeptical (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this, but I wonder if wishful thinking is just a way of implementing a particular strategy for survivial. What I suggest could be applied to running a business or living in a Darwinian world.
There are a couple of ways to go about survival in a highly competitive enviornment.
The most straightforward is to be better than everybody else at one or more things. If your competitors run at 3-4mph and you can run at 5mph then you're going to be the one that catches the gazalle and has dinner. The problem with this approach is that EVERYBODY is trying to catch that gazelle and EVERYBODY is out on the track every morning trying to run a little faster. If you succeed at all it will only be by a little bit, but a little bit is enough, so I think this is the predominant method of survival.
The other approach is to just try to do something completely differently. Most likely you'll fail and starve and your genes won't be passed on (directly - though your cousin might pass them on), but just maybe you'll succeed. If you do succeed there is a good chance that it won't be just by an incremental margin.
So, if I were designing an ultimate survivor species, I'd have it do a grinding incremental evolution (approach #1) most of the time. However, I'd also have members of the species occassionally take huge risks for a possible huge reward. As long as families are big enough and these risks aren't frequent then even if the odd member of the family dies the genes that convey these tendencies will still be passed on. If a family member gets lucky then it will be at the top of the food chain for generations.
Perhaps wishful thinking is just an artifact of the brain that we call "wishful thinking" when things go wrong, and "creativity" or "innovation" when that crazy idea that everybody knows won't work actually does work?
Randomness is Vital (Score:5, Interesting)
This type of decision making might simply be an evolutionarily-selected random seeding.
For example, when running an evolutionary algorithm, it is vital to have randomness seeded into the mix. This allows for the system or algorithm to escape from local maxima.
Douglas Adams had a great quote at the end of one of his last lectures regarding humans' re-invention of everything - nothing is ever 'good enough': http://www.guba.com/watch/3000053272 [guba.com]
Perhaps this is all that just random, unpredictable outcomes from a horrendously complex system we call the brain, which has emerged out of a random, unpredictable and horrendously complex universe.
Homo Experimentus (Score:3, Interesting)
There are a lot of "are people rational" experiments along these lines, and my gut tells me that many run afoul of an incorrect understanding of the context in which experimental participants are making their decision.
For example, if I choose to defect and screw my opponent, will I be exposed as a cheat when the results of the study are published? What will the experimenter think of me? Will that hurt my chances of an advantageous trade with the experimenter in the future? Am I likely to face reprisal from my opponent? What moral ground will I have gained in subsequent negotiations over an opponent who I knew cheated me? What does it do to my opinion of myself now that I consider myself untrustworthy?
The brain has to balance innumerable factors such as this when considering the consequences of social actions. My suspicion is that these experiments teach us less about whether 'homo economicus' exists, and more about how hard it to design experiments to reveal him.
Re:Unfortunately I'm a Bit Skeptical (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree. It feels like this sort of headline is going to get people thinking "spooky quantum particle magic" rather than just using some of the same math that is used in quantum mechanics to model how competing reflexes and instincts add up to a decision.
When weighing our decision we have to take into consideration the chance that we misunderstood the rules of the game or that the explanation was a lie and we're being conned. We have all sorts of social reflexes and instincts that compete to overrule any mathematical solution we think we've found. If I read it correctly, it is the way you can model all these competing reactions adding up to a single decision that they are suggesting is similar to a superposition of probabilities you see in physics models.
Then again, I might be wrong. *waffles*
Re:Quantum Buzzwords (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree it's misleading. Basically it says that quantum math seems to match some aspects of human behavior. In other words, it models it fairly well; however, that by itself does not mean that our brains use quantum calculations. It just means that it has modeling value.
This can be illustrated with the "epicycle" models used to model the movements of the planets as seen from Earth before the sun-centric model gained ground. The epicycle models were relatively accurate (after some tweaking), but it turns out that it was not an accurate representation of the mechanism involved (sun-centered plus gravity). In short, Accurate modeling and matching/mirror the actual mechanism behind a process may not be related. Prediction is not always the same as explaining.
Re:Why is defection considered rational? (Score:3, Interesting)
Interestingly, the most empirically successful strategy in iterated prisoner's dilemma games [wikipedia.org] is "tit for tat with forgiveness". If you're playing with someone who isn't as altruistic as you are, total welfare in the long run can be higher by punishing betrayal than by unconditional cooperation.
In real life, you also have to consider reputation effects: if future partners will be aware of and punish you for your history of betrayal, the most successful strategy is to cooperate, even if you're playing selfishly.
Hofstadter's superrationality (see link) is a nice idea, but I'm not convinced it's the best explanation for observed cooperative societies.
Re:Why is defection considered rational? (Score:1, Interesting)
Given that both players will act the same, each player should cooperate.
Re:Unfortunately I'm a Bit Skeptical (Score:5, Interesting)
I was thinking the same thing. If everyone does the same thing, this leads to two results, one of which you mentioned. Superiority is going to be an incremental issue, since everyone is racing for the same goal. The second is, it's obvious that that is your goal. For instance, as a prey species, if all the predators are going for speed, I might go for maneuverability. Sure, I can't outrun them, but I can change direction with no speed loss and they have to slow down, loop back, and speed up again. It might give me enough time to get away, or (on a species scale) just not make it profitable for that type of predator to catch me.
Throwing in random variability improves overall success for the species because you have a built-in response to the unusual and the unexpected - you do unusual and unexpected things, too. And your responses might be just what's needed in certain survival circumstances.
Oh, I agree with you. (Score:3, Interesting)
I completely agree. What I'm saying is that "if" there is free will at all, the mechanism that enables it cannot be deterministic. As far as I can tell, it's only at the quantum level that an individual event is no longer tied to determinism.
But yes, I am of the opinion that free will, in the classic sense, doesn't actually exist.
Re:Unfortunately I'm a Bit Skeptical (Score:2, Interesting)
This all by itself is enough to explain why wishful thinking exists and is useful and important.
If you look at the history of civilizations in the world, competitive attitudes are contrary to survival, and cultures that embrace them are generally a flash in the pan. Co-operative civilizations last for thousands and thousands of years where competitive ones generally destroy themselves within a couple of dozen generations of man.
I imagine these civilizations always think their ideas are novel and powerful achievements, just like we feel today, and that the reason for this is that these types of civilizations fail so utterly that their ideas not preserved, but are lost to time. That's why they always seem novel and progressive.
or... wishful thinking may depend on groupthink. (Score:3, Interesting)
Quite simply, if enough Americans at once buy into the housing market with wishful thinking (yeah, I can make housing payments that are 80% of my income), then when things fail, they use group think to take the wealth of others and recoup their losses.
In other words, the wishful thinking may pay off in gang-type situations.
I had this happen to me in college, when a 2-credit-hour class was demanding reports that took 25 hrs per week. I did it, and most of the others didn't, but mine were all 2 days late. So when the end of the class came, and not one had been cracked by the GTA, he simply assigned grades of 90 - 10 * (# days late). This was supported by the faculty, on the basis that if they graded them appropriately, most of the students would fail, while if they accepted the GTA's decision, most of the students would have a B, while I had a D.
The key, though, is that your wishful thinking has to allow you to hide out in a crowd, and more specificially the biggest crowd around.
Of course, that's what 94% of all lemmings say when polled by American Research Corporation (translations applied by Google Translation).
Re:Unfortunately I'm a Bit Skeptical (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you may just have hit the nail right on the head. "Wishful thinking" is, in the long run, an unconventional idea that didn't work out. Calling an idea "wishful thinking" before it's tried is just making a prediction that it won't work. (Of course, sometimes the idea calls for a violation of the laws of physics, making that prediction easy, but that's just a simplification of the prediction.)
Game Theory was there first (Score:3, Interesting)
There is an implicit assumption by the mathematicians that people are not being rational because they are not choosing the mathematically optimal result.
But I would argue that they are choosing the evolutionarily optimal result.
Consider this: All game theory experiments in which the participants were likely to encounter the same players more than once during the experiment have indicated that the optimal strategy in the prisoners dilemma was an eye for an eye, with a tendency to cooperate or reconcile. That is, they would be inclined to trust the other guy, unless the other guy defects. This offers the best chance of achieving optimal results over multiple games.
This is exactly what the participants did in the math study. And this is how people generally behave in a social society.
Contrast that with a game where the participants are never known to one another and unlikely to encounter each other twice. In those scenarios, the optimum strategy was to screw your neighbor (defect). This was the strategy considered optimal by the mathematicians in the article. Since this is an unnatural environment, it is small wonder that the participants appeared to behave irrationally. But you don't need special math to describe it.
We are hard wired to cooperate.
That IS rational.
Re:Unfortunately I'm a Bit Skeptical (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:You paraphrase Feynmann (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps you read less into my post. Or. more accurately and less stylistically, perhaps you amplified my thinking in a different direction. What you say may be true, I don't know, but it does not take into account metaphor.
The human mind cannot fabricate a concept out of nothingness; this is a fundamental concept. A mind cannot conceive of what it cannot imagine or find outside. That which is discovered must be understood in a way the human mind understands things. The image of the Benzene ring came out of a dream's metaphor of a snake eating its tail, but one does not even have to be that dramatic to understand the concept.
As the "big bang" concept (matter/time/space after, unknown before) is a metaphor for our own human birth (matter, time and space after, unknown before) the quantum uncertainty concept is related to the mind's processes as described in TFA. In fact, that relationship is the entire point of the paper.
In essence, I meant to say the precise nature of the universe can never be known except in terms the mind can understand, which seems to give the universe human psychological properties. Which is so obvious as to be redundant!
And I paraphrase Feynmann as accurately as I can from memory of the reports of his address given by Newsweek on the event of his prize.
Re:People are stupid. (Score:1, Interesting)
The Deal Or No Deal example is flawed - The big rule of game shows is that if your episode doesn't go to air then you don't get the prize. Contestants are told this beforehand, so they also know that if they accept the $50k deal 10 minutes into the contest that it won't go to air, as they have nothing to fill their half hour with.
That's also why you see seemingly normal people having these crazy long winded conversations with the host or tell pointless unfunny stories - they are trying to fill-out their segment and also be a bit wacky/zany to give their episode more chance of going to air and therefore getting the prize - winning $100 is better than thinking you've won $50k then finding out you get nothing because you weren't entertaining or for long enough!