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Quantum Theory May Explain Wishful Thinking
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."
The same mathematical model does not necessarily mean that thought processes are driven by anything quantum mechanical. Quantum theory uses probability models as do psychological models. They are defined by probability theory and not the other way round. i.e. quantum theory uses models that existed before the discretization of energy was even considered.
Classical decision Theory *does* account for human's decision making. "Personal bias" (aka values) are very much accounted for.
And no quantum mechanics does not apply to this research.
True. But they don't say that it does -- they say that they applied a model from quantum mechanics, which is another thing entirely.
Quantum mechanics is not random;
Essentially false.
it's predictable and understandable
Mostly true.
The human mind is not a special and unique snowflake. You are a computer. I am a computer. You are a computer. The brain is literally a quivering mound of hacks: look at fMRI studies sometime. We operate according to the same laws of physics that govern that boiler over in the corner. Get over yourselves already.
Look: maybe it was acceptable in the 18th century to imagine some special mechanism for the human mind, but no longer. There are simply no mental phenomena that require quantum mechanics to understand. It's far easier to suppose that we are simply flawed creatures that sometimes make bad decisions using heuristics adapted more for the African savannah than New York.
I believe that the repeated Prisoner's Dilema is most of the time badly explained. It is explained a infinitely repeated game game were at each step you have to make a decision.
An other model is to consider the meta strategy that is the strategy rule of each step to maximize the average outcome. Since the game is infinite, you do not care about the initialization of the process. Recall that the goal is not to have more "points" than the other player. It is just to have the most point possible
Providing the game will not stay in (not defect, defect) for a long time, the only two long term strategies are (defect, defect) and (not defect, not defect). The latter is clearly a better one.
The map is not the terrain. The model is not the phenomenon. No matter how detailed and accurate, this remains true. A particular model may describe something and have nothing to do with the real world.
Wishful thinking is far more easily, accurately and realistically described by the well proven phenomenon cognitive dissonance supporting another well understood function that causes rapid jumps to wrong conclusions, heuristic problem solving. When done in a social context, the primary attribution bias would definitely contribute.
The researchers in TFA, as psychologists, are certainly well aware of these facts. To present such an outlandish, unsupported and non-parsimonious construct when well understood and supported theory already explains more than their "model" (I find it highly unlikely they've actually constructed one) is to take science, dress it in miniskirt, knee high boots and too much make up, and send it out to walk the streets.
http://www.humantruth.info/thinking_errors.html
http://www.experiencefestival.com/cognitive_bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
His point was that a grad student using an electron microscope will see precisely what he was trained to (expects to) see. This, of course, is derived from the basic quantum concept that the observer affects the observed.
It sounds like you are reading more into that concept than is actually there (which is a common mistake - see the pseudoscience in What The [Bleep] Do We Know?). The effect in question isn't about conscious observers. It's about physical interactions between particles.
An electron microscope will have an effect on the subject being imaged whether or not a grad student is looking through it. In addition, a grad student (like any other human) will certainly impart their own biases on the results - even if it's by failing to notice something in the image because they were only looking where they expected to find something, and not elsewhere. But the second isn't a quantum-mechanical effect. It's a procedural/data-processing issue.
Apologies if I read something into your post that wasn't actually there.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman