Costello, Fintan and Watts, Paul
(2018)
Invariants in probabilistic reasoning.
Cognitive Pscychology, 100.
pp. 1-16.
ISSN 0010-0285
Abstract
Recent research has identified three invariants or identities that appear to hold in people’s
probabilistic reasoning: the QQ identity, the addition law identity, and the Bayes rule identity
(Costello and Watts, 2014, 2016a, Fisher and Wolfe, 2014, Wang and Busemeyer, 2013, Wang
et al., 2014). Each of these identities represent specific agreement with the requirements of
normative probability theory; strikingly, these identities seem to hold in people’s judgements
despite the presence of strong and systematic biases against the requirements of normative
probability theory in those very same judgements. These results suggest that the systematic
biases seen in people’s probabilistic reasoning follow mathematical rules: for these particular
identities, these rules cause an overall cancellation of biases and so produce agreement with
normative requirements. We assess two competing mathematical models of probabilistic reasoning (the ‘probability theory plus noise’ model and the ‘quantum probability’ model) in terms
of their ability to account for this pattern of systematic biases and invariant identities.
| Item Type: |
Article
|
| Keywords: |
Rationality;
Biases;
Probability; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Science and Engineering > Theoretical Physics |
| Item ID: |
13096 |
| Identification Number: |
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2017.11.003 |
| Depositing User: |
Paul Watts
|
| Date Deposited: |
23 Jun 2020 15:26 |
| Journal or Publication Title: |
Cognitive Pscychology |
| Publisher: |
Elsevier |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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