Quantum math makes human irrationality more sensible

People often say that quantum physics is weird because it doesnt seem rational.
But of course, if you think about it, quantum physics is actually perfectly rational, if you
understand the math. Its people who typically seem irrational.
In fact, some psychologists have spent their careers making fun of people for
irrational choices when presented with artificial situations amenable to statistical
analysis. Making allowances for sometimes shaky methodology, there really are cases
where people make choices that dont seem to make much sense. One well-known
example involved asking students whether they would buy a ticket for a Hawaii vacation
in three different situations: They had passed a big test, they had failed the test, or they
didnt yet know whether they had passed or failed. More than half said they would buy
the ticket if they had passed. Even more said they would buy the ticket if they failed. But
30 percent said they wouldnt buy a ticket until they found out whether they had passed
or failed.
It seems odd that people would decide to buy right away if they knew the
outcome of the test, no matter what it was, but hesitated when the outcome was
unknown. Such behavior violated a statistical maxim known as the sure thing principle.
Basically, it says that if you prefer X if A is true, and you prefer X if A isnt true, then you
should prefer X whether A is true or not. So it shouldnt matter whether you know if A is
true. That seems logical, but its not always how people behave.
So are people just incapable of thinking logically? Maybe. But in recent years a
number of investigators have developed the view that those supposedly irrational
choices merely reflect the fact that peoples brains are guided by the mathematical
principles of quantum physics.
These researchers are not saying that the brain is a quantum computer,
exploiting actual quantum weirdness for thinking and reasoning. Theyre just saying that
the quantum mathematics describing physical processes operating in the natural world
is the same as the math describing the cognitive processes operating in the brain.
Twenty years ago, a group of physicists and psychologists introduced the bold idea of
applying the abstract principles from quantum theory outside of physics to the field of
human judgment and decision making, Jerome Busemeyer of Indiana University and
collaborators write in a recent paper on arXiv.org. This new field, called quantum
cognition, has proved to be able to account for puzzling behavioral phenomena that are
found in studies of a variety of human judgments and decisions.
Violation of the sure thing principle, for instance, can be explained using quantum
math, as Jose Acacio de Barros of San Francisco State University and Gary Oas of
Stanford show in another recent paper on arXiv.org. Whether to buy the ticket to Hawaii
or not can be viewed as a double-slit quantum interference experiment, where an
electron passes through a screen with two slits in it and lands on a detector surface. If
one of the slits is closed (corresponding to pass or fail on the test), the electron behaves
like a particle and lands at a precise spot on the screen. If the two slits are open (you
dont know the test outcome) the electron behaves like a wave, making it impossible to
say which slit the electron actually passed through (corresponding to not knowing the
test outcome). The electron wave interferes with itself, changing the probabilities of
where it will land on the screen. A quantum mechanical analysis shows that those
quantum probabilities violate the sure thing principle predictions, just as the psychology
students did.
Various other supposedly irrational decision making practices and poor
probability judgments have been analyzed using aspects of quantum math. Quantum
models of judgment and decision have made impressive progress organizing and
accounting for a wide range of puzzling findings using a common set of principles,
Busemeyer and colleagues write.
Most recently, a quantum analysis was invoked to explain the puzzle of why
public opinion polls get different results when the same questions are asked in a
different order. Suppose, for instance, you ask whether Shoeless Joe Jackson should
be in theBaseball Hall of Fame. And then you ask the same for Pete Rose. If you switch
the order, asking about Rose first and then Jackson, you get different yes/no
proportions. (Jackson gets more yes votes if you ask about him first.) Psychologists
refer to this phenomenon as a context effect.
Quantum probabilities can explain this paradox, as Zheng Wang and Tyler
Solloway of Ohio State University, collaborating with Busemeyer and Richard Shiffrin of
Indiana, reported online June 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences.
To oversimplify, in quantum mechanics A x B does not necessarily equal B x A
(because the math uses matrices, which do not commute). So doing an operation in a
different order can produce a different result. But even more striking is another quantum
requirement. Not only will switching order change the answers, but the number of
people who change from answering yes to both questions to answering no both
times must be offset by the number who switch from no-no to yes-yes. Likewise, the
number of people who switch from yesno to noyes must be offset by the number
who switch in the opposite direction, Wang and colleagues write.
Analyzing data from dozens of opinion polls shows that this equal offset requirement is
actually met when question order is switched to test the context effect, the Ohio State
and Indiana investigators found. Such a result is predicted by quantum math even
though there is no obvious psychological reason for it.
To our knowledge, no traditional psychology theories impose this precise kind of
symmetry constraint on context effects, Wang and collaborators write. Since quantum
physics does demand this sort of constraint, maybe its time to apply subatomic math to
subconscious reasoning. Even if the brains neural processes operate by classical
rules, quantum probability may provide a better description than classical probability for
the way humans reason under uncertainty, Wangs group asserts.
It would no doubt to be wise to withhold judgment for a while on whether
quantum math really holds the secrets to quantifying cognition. But its at least curiosity-
worthy that so many examples of quantum-brain analogies seem to describe
psychological phenomena. And in a way, these experiments support some of the
insights articulated by Niels Bohr, one of quantum physicss founding fathers, many
decades ago.
In 1929, Bohr noted that quantum physics refuted the view that analyzing brain
processes could reveal a causal chain that formed a unique representation of the
emotional mental experience. But in quantum physics, Bohr emphasized, an observer
inevitably interacted with whatever was being observed, so any attempt to acquire a
knowledge of such [mental] processes involves a fundamentally uncontrollable
interference with their course.
Bohr foresaw that grasping the similarities shared by quantum and mental
processes could lead to a deeper understanding of human thought.
Although, in the present case, we can be concerned only with more or less fitting
analogies, yet we can hardly escape the conviction that in the facts which are revealed
to us by the quantum theory we have acquired a means of elucidating general
philosophical problems.
So it might still be wrong, but its not entirely crazy, to think that human thought is
susceptible to quantum quantification. Quantum reality underlies the ordinary (or
classical) reality that we perceive. That reality emerges from quantum systems
operating in the context of environmental influences, ranging from specific experimental
observations to air molecules bouncing off of other atoms.
In a similar way, as Wang and colleagues assert, human judgments are often
not simply read out from memory, but rather, they are constructed from the cognitive
state for the question at hand. Consequently drawing a conclusion about one question
alters the context, disturbing the cognitive system just as a quantum measurement
disturbs an electron. Such disturbances will influence the answer to the next question,
so that human judgments do not always obey the commutative rule of Boolean logic.
If we replace human judgments with physical measurements, Wang and colleagues
write, and replace cognitive system with physical system, then these are exactly the
same reasons that led physicists to develop quantum theory in the first place.