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A Unified Theory of Human Judgements and Decision-Making under Uncertainty

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journal contribution
posted on 2021-05-10, 09:55 authored by Raffaele Pisano, Sandro Sozzo
Growing empirical evidence reveals that traditional set-theoretic structures cannot in general be applied to cognitive phenomena. This has raised several problems, as illustrated, for example, by probability judgement errors and decision-making (DM) errors. We propose here a unified theoretical perspective which applies the mathematical formalism of quantum theory in Hilbert space to cognitive domains. In this perspective, judgements and decisions are described as intrinsically non-deterministic processes which involve a contextual interaction between a conceptual entity and the cognitive context surrounding it. When a given phenomenon is considered, the quantum-theoretic framework identifies entities, states, contexts, properties and outcome statistics, and applies the mathematical formalism of quantum theory to model the considered phenomenon. We explain how the quantum-theoretic framework works in a variety of judgement and decision situations where systematic and significant deviations from classicality occur.

Funding

This work was supported by QUARTZ (Quantum Information Access and Retrieval Theory), the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network 721321 of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

History

Citation

Pisano, R.; Sozzo, S. A Unified Theory of Human Judgements and Decision-Making under Uncertainty. Entropy 2020, 22, 738. https://doi.org/10.3390/e22070738

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Published in

Entropy

Volume

22

Issue

7

Pagination

738

Publisher

MDPI

issn

1099-4300

eissn

1099-4300

Acceptance date

2020-07-01

Copyright date

2020

Available date

2021-05-10

Language

English