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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."
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.
My work here is dung.
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.
Or is that just wishful thinking?
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
which is why I make sure every cat I put in a box has been killed beforehand. Suck on that, Schrodinger.
Classical decision Theory *does* account for human's decision making. "Personal bias" (aka values) are very much accounted for.
Since chemistry, electricity and matter at the level of cells, neurons, ganglia, etc. behave deterministically, if free will exists at all the root of it MUST be found at the quantum level.
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.
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.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I really wish I could believe that.
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
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.
The way that people parrot Quantum Theory at the moment (in an attempt to explain anything vaguely unexplained) has parallels with the Victorian reliance on the Luminiferous Aether.
In other news: a recent study by the American Wave Mechanics Society suggests wishful thinking may explain quantum mechanics.
Obligitory XKCD comic
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
Roger Penrose hypothesized this 20 years ago.
...thought of this before...
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.
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
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.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
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.
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 checked my pocket to see if I had any money and the measurement collapsed my wishful thinking wave function into an economic dystopia defined from negative infinity to positive infinity (sorry everybody).
I wish I had checked my mail instead. I might have resolved the universe into a superposition sqrt((depression**2 +/- boomtime**2) / 2).
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.
Table-ized A.I.
"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."
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.
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.
You don't need to invoke quantum mechanics to explain why a bunch of software written over a period of several billion years using a random walk algorithm and just about every bad software development model (cargo cult programming, spaghetti inheritance, copy-and-paste, ...) doesn't always follow the optimal course of action.
I blame Penrose. Not because I have a logical reason for it, but because blaming Penrose makes my R-complex feel good. Yummy.
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.
..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.
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).
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
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.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
I hereby nominate you for the "funniest-very-short-reply-to-a-very-long-rambling" trophy.