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  • E15: The Cost of Deciding Too Fast – Dr. Peter Kvam on How Humans (and AI) Rush Judgments

    E15: The Cost of Deciding Too Fast – Dr. Peter Kvam on How Humans (and AI) Rush Judgments
    2026/09/01

    We're wired to want closure. The moment information tips us far enough in one direction, we stop gathering more and call it a decision – and that instinct, argues Ohio State decision scientist Dr. Peter Kvam, is quietly costing us better judgment, in politics, relationships, and now in AI systems too.

    Dr. Kvam – head of Ohio State University’s Decision Sciences Collaborative – walks through why rushing to commit makes opinions more extreme, not more accurate: once you decide, you stop searching for information that might complicate the picture, and the "loudest" information (the most emotionally charged, most polarizing) is what gets you there fastest. We trace how that same rush-to-judgment pattern shows up when radiologists lean too hard on AI summaries, when a cancer-detection model quietly learned to read a hospital's watermark instead of the actual pathology, and when any of us fill out a spreadsheet to "decide" a job offer we'd already picked in our gut. Along the way, Kvam offers a genuinely useful reframe – rate the quality of your options instead of forcing a binary choice – and explains, in plain language, why "measuring" a belief (i.e. making someone decide) is mathematically similar to what happens when you measure a quantum particle.

    =================================

    Links:

    📖Substack: https://superposeddecisions.substack.com/

    📺YouTube: @Superposed_Decisions

    🤝LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidan-m-lewis/

    =================================

    What you'll take away:

    • Why the fastest, most confident decisions are usually the least informed ones – and why "sitting in uncertainty" is a decision-making skill, not a weakness

    • Why AI's most dangerous errors don't look like mistakes – they look like a cancer-detection model that's "right" for a reason that has nothing to do with cancer

    • Why simply reframing a decision as "rate this option's quality" instead of "should I choose this" measurably reduces polarization and extremism

    =================================

    Primary Sources

    Kvam, P. D., Sokratous, K., Fitch, A., & Hintze, A. (2024). Using artificial intelligence to fit, compare, evaluate, and discover computational models of decision behavior. Decision, 11(4), 599–618. https://doi.org/10.1037/dec0000237

    Kvam, P. D., Marley, A. A. J., & Heathcote, A. (2023). A unified theory of discrete and continuous responding. Psychological Review, 130(2), 368–400. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000378

    Kvam, P. D., Alaukik, A., Mims, C. E., Martemyanova, A., & Baldwin, M. (2022). Rational inference strategies and the genesis of polarization and extremism. Scientific Reports, 12, 7344. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-11389-0

    Konstantina Sokratous, Anderson K. Fitch, Peter D. Kvam,

    How to ask twenty questions and win: Machine learning tools for assessing preferences from small samples of willingness-to-pay prices, Journal of Choice Modelling, 48, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jocm.2023.100418

    P.D. Kvam,T.J. Pleskac,S. Yu, & J.R. Busemeyer, Interference effects of choice on confidence: Quantum characteristics of evidence accumulation, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 112 (34) 10645-10650, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1500688112 (2015)

    =================================

    Secondary Sources:

    Cognition & Decision Modeling Laboratory, Dr. Peter Kvam (Ohio State University): https://peterkvam.com/research.html

    The Ohio State University Decision Sciences Collaborative: https://decisionsciences.osu.edu/

    Dr. Peter Kvam Faculty Page: https://psychology.osu.edu/people/kvam.4

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    1 時間
  • E14: How to save a country – Zelensky's Decision That Kept Ukraine From Falling

    E14: How to save a country – Zelensky's Decision That Kept Ukraine From Falling
    2026/08/25
    It's February 2022. Russian paratroopers are storming an airfield outside Kyiv, attacks are storming in from three directions, and the president of Ukraine has just been told his government may fall within 72 hours. A year earlier, Volodymyr Zelensky was a little more than a sitcom actor turned president with approval ratings so low that allies quietly doubted whether he could lead a crisis at all. Now the Americans and British are offering him a seat out – and what he says next will decide whether Ukraine has a government left to defend.=================================Links: 📖Substack: https://superposeddecisions.substack.com/ 📺YouTube: @Superposed_Decisions 🤝LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidan-m-lewis/=================================Roughly 34 helicopters and airborne troops stormed Hostomel Airport outside Kyiv to open an air bridge for reinforcements, but Ukrainian forces retook the airfield after a day of fighting, while the Belarusian armor column stalled into a 35-mile roadblock. With Kyiv's fall reportedly expected within 72 hours and Zelensky marked "target No. 1," the US and UK both offered evacuation. He refused, reportedly telling US officials, "I need ammunition, not a ride."=================================We run Zelensky's decision through the four pillars of quantum cognition. In superposition, he held at least four live options – flee the country, hide inside Ukraine, stay in Kyiv silently, or stay in Kyiv and become the public face of resistance – and collapsed toward the riskiest one. Interference did the collapsing: the internal pull of family history, national identity, and the sense that "we have no other Ukraine" overrode the external pressure to save himself, showing how internal drives pushed him toward taking risk for the collective good. Contextuality shaped which options were even visible – a 72-hour deadline, a target on his back, and a grandfather's war against fascism all narrowed what "staying" could mean. And non-commutative effects sealed it: the moment his video hit twenty million views, the world had measured his choice, and there was no walking it back. =================================What you'll take away:Courage isn't the absence of fear – it's using fear to power your decisions.You are your own hero. It doesn’t take someone “made of steel”. All you have to do is decide to overcome the context you are given.The options that survive contextual pressure are usually the ones an identity was already built to choose =================================Primary Sources:Born, D., & Caligiuri, P. (2024). Leaders' Psychological Bravery. Journal of Character and Leadership Development, 11(1), 62–65. https://doi.org/10.58315/jcld.v11.292Wang, J., Sun, D., Jiang, J., Wang, H., Cheng, X., Ruan, Q., & Wang, Y. (2022). The effect of courage on stress: The mediating mechanism of behavioral inhibition and behavioral activation in high-risk occupations. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 961387. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.961387=================================Secondary Sources:Courage: Why some people act despite fearCBS News – Zelenskyy confirms "ammunition, not a ride" quoteThe Intercept – Zelensky's defiant Kyiv selfie videosCFR Global Conflict Tracker – War in UkraineThePrint/The Conversation – Zelensky's servant leadership analysisWar on the Rocks – Battle of Hostomel AirportUNHCR – Ukraine emergency human cost explainerCNN – Zelensky refuses US evacuation offerFrontiers in Psychology – Zelenskyy's social media wartime strategyNPR – Zelenskyy comedian to wartime icon profileThe Daily Telegraph (via PressReader) – Zelensky refused to abandon Kyiv compoundCNN – Analysis: Zelensky is not Churchill, he's a more unlikely heroThe Collector – King George VI leading Britain through WWII
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    23 分
  • E13: Is Silence the Boldest Move? – Fauci's 100+ Pleas of the Fifth Seen Through Quantum Cognition

    E13: Is Silence the Boldest Move? – Fauci's 100+ Pleas of the Fifth Seen Through Quantum Cognition
    2026/08/18
    For 38 years, Anthony Fauci answered Congress's questions – through 7 presidential administrations and the most consequential public health crisis in a century. Then a senator he calls "unhinged" called him back to the stand for one more round, and the man who spent a career giving testimony gave the same seven words instead: “I decline to answer”, on the advice of his counsel. He said it more than 100 times. The question isn't whether Fauci had something to hide – it's what has to be true about your options before silence becomes the smartest thing you can say.=================================Links: 📖Substack: https://superposeddecisions.substack.com/ 📺YouTube: @Superposed_Decisions 🤝LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidan-m-lewis/=================================Fauci ran NIAID through COVID and held firm that the virus jumped naturally from animals to humans in a Wuhan wet market, not from an engineered leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) never bought it, filing criminal referrals against Fauci with the Justice Department in both 2021 and 2023. On January 19, 2025 President Biden issued Fauci a sweeping, unconditional preemptive pardon. Six days earlier, Paul had taken the gavel at the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and subpoenaed fourteen federal agencies – including NIH, HHS, FBI, CIA, and DOJ – for records tied to COVID's origins and gain-of-function funding. By September 2025, more than 1,000 pages of Fauci's private diaries were released, showing that 10 of 12 expert scientists agreed a lab-engineered mutation was plausible.=================================We run Fauci's decision through the four pillars of quantum cognition. Superposition holds four live options at once: fully testify, selectively testify, don't show up at all, or plead the Fifth. Interference is comparatively quiet here – unlike SBF's decision in Episode 12, this reads as calculated legal strategy more than internal turmoil. Contextuality does the real work: he's compelled to appear, the pardon doesn't cover anything he says in this testimony, truthful answers risk self-incrimination, false ones risk perjury, and selective testimony invites the same exposure as neither. Non-commutative, measurement-style effects close the loop – being watched live by the committee and the press collapses his options toward whichever one is safest to say out loud, not necessarily the one that's true.=================================What you'll take away:Why "doing nothing" is often the highest-leverage move on the table, not the absence of one – the difference between strategic neutrality and passivityHow external constraints, not internal doubt, can collapse a four-option superposition down to a single survivable choiceWhy treating fear as information rather than a threat changes which options even register as viable under pressure=================================This is not a debate about COVID's origins or Fauci's guilt. It's a decision-science breakdown of why pleading the Fifth became the only option in his superposition that satisfied every contextual constraint stacked against him.=================================Primary Sources:Hartley, C. A., & Phelps, E. A. (2012). Anxiety and decision-making. Biological Psychiatry, 72(2), 113–118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2011.12.027=================================Secondary Sources:How Does Fear Influence Risk Assessment and Decision-Making?Cognitive Bias Cheat SheetDr. Paul Issues Subpoenas to Fourteen Agencies Regarding COVID-19 Origins and Risky Gain-of-Function ResearchChairman Rand Paul Uncovers New Evidence of Fauci Deleting Official Records, Calls Him to Testify Before HSGACSen. Rand Paul says he'll move to hold Fauci in contempt after combative hearingWhy was Fauci held in contempt for pleading the 5th, and what happens next?Biden pardons Fauci, Milley and members of Jan. 6 panel
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    25 分
  • E12: Is Pain Justified by Hope? – SBF’s $11B Fraud Seen Through Quantum Cognition

    E12: Is Pain Justified by Hope? – SBF’s $11B Fraud Seen Through Quantum Cognition
    2026/08/11
    He ran a $32 billion crypto exchange, lived by a philosophy built to justify getting rich in the name of doing good, and in ten days watched it collapse into bankruptcy after stealing $11 billion in customer funds. Sam Bankman-Fried didn't stumble into fraud – he reasoned his way into it. The question isn't whether he knew it was illegal. He did. The question is what shifted the odds so far in favor of crime that it felt, to him, like the only path forward.=================================Links:📖Substack: https://superposeddecisions.substack.com/ 📺YouTube: @Superposed_Decisions🤝LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidan-m-lewis/ =================================Bankman-Fried left Jane Street in 2017 to start Alameda Research, then launched FTX in 2019 after Alameda posted heavy losses – using FTX customer deposits to quietly cover the shortfall. By November 2022, a whistleblower and some fast reporting exposed the hole: billions siphoned to plug Alameda's deficit, fund investments, and make undisclosed political donations, including reported contributions to Chinese officials. SBF was convicted on seven counts of fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy, and sentenced to 25 years. Underneath the mechanics of the collapse sat a philosophy – effective altruism, or "earning to give" – that gave Bankman-Fried a ready-made justification: amass enough wealth and power now, and the good you do later outweighs the harm along the way.=================================We run SBF's decision through the four pillars of quantum cognition. Superposition holds "commit fraud" and "don't commit fraud" as live options simultaneously, right up until a decision collapses one into reality. Interference explains why that collapse tilted toward fraud: SBF's reported social isolation, his stated desire to be "hugely, hugely politically influential," and a wide gap between his analytical reasoning and his emotional regulation all pushed the same direction. Contextuality shows how external pressure – Alameda's mounting losses versus the very real threat of prison – set the frame those interference effects acted within. And running through all of it is effective altruism itself: not a minor contextual detail, but the interference force strong enough to make stealing customer funds look, to SBF, like the rational move.=================================What you'll take away:Why "earning to give" can function less as ethics and more as a permission structure for present-day harmHow a wide gap between analytical reasoning and emotional regulation can skew which options even register as "on the table"Why a strong, examined moral compass – not just external consequences like legal risk – is often what keeps a decision-frame from collapsing into the worst option=================================Primary SourcesYoder, K. J., & Decety, J. (2018). The neuroscience of morality and social decision-making. Psychology, Crime & Law, 24(3), 279–295. https://doi.org/10.1080/1068316X.2017.1414817Kusev, P., Martin, R., van Schaik, P., & Teal, J. (2025). Moral decision-making "on the fly." Psychological Research, 89(3), 98. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-025-02126-zDr. Fiery Cushman’s Lab =================================Secondary SourcesPsychology of SBF's public apologySBF's flawed decision-making philosophyDeep behavioral lessons from SBF caseSBF and effective altruism originsMichael Lewis's portrayal of SBF's characterLewis on SBF vs. MadoffJudge Kaplan's assessment of SBF testimonyAlameda Research founding and historyFTX funding rounds and valuationsFTX Alameda $65 billion backdoorComplete timeline of FTX collapse from court testimonyTrial of Sam Bankman-Fried – case recordSBF sentencing, Kaplan's political-ambition remarksDOJ press release – SBF sentencing
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    26 分
  • E11: Stocks, Quantum Cognition, & the Great Crash of 1929

    E11: Stocks, Quantum Cognition, & the Great Crash of 1929
    2026/08/04
    Picture this: the Dow has just fallen 49% in two weeks, three trading days now carry the name "Black" like scars, and a fortune built on borrowed money has evaporated overnight. By the summer of 1932, the Dow sat at 41 – 89% below its 1929 peak. Every dollar in a margin account isn't just gone; it's owed back, with interest. This is the story of how millions of ordinary investors, convinced the market would rise "permanently," built and then detonated the greatest wealth-destruction event in American history – and how the exact same psychological wiring is still firing every time you open a trading app today.Between 1921 and 1929, the Dow climbed an incredible 504%, fueled by unregulated margin trading that let everyday Americans buy stocks the way they'd put a house on a credit card. When the market turned in late October 1929, it didn't correct – it collapsed, wiping out nearly half its value in two weeks across what became known as Black Thursday, Black Monday, and Black Tuesday. Margin debtors who couldn't cover their loans cracked an already fragile banking system; panicked depositors then stormed their local banks in four separate waves through the early 1930s, closing 9,000 banks in the process. Two mass decisions – the crash itself and the runs that followed – helped bring the U.S. economy to its knees, and left a psychological blueprint that resurfaces in the 2020 COVID crash, the 2022 crypto collapse, and the 2025 tariff sell-off.This episode runs the crash through Superposed's four-part lens of quantum cognition. The superposition is the deceptively simple menu every investor from 1929 to today actually faces: buy, hold, or sell. Interference comes from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's Prospect Theory – reference points, loss aversion, diminishing sensitivity, and probability weighting all distort that menu before logic ever gets a vote. Contextuality shows how news, earnings, and macro shocks – a tariff announcement, a pandemic, a bank failure – reframe the exact same asset from "buy" to "sell" almost overnight.=================================Links:📖Substack: https://superposeddecisions.substack.com/ 📺YouTube: @Superposed_Decisions🤝LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidan-m-lewis/ =================================What you'll take away:Why the "buy, hold, or sell" decision is never really about the stock – it's about which reference point your brain locked onto, and when.How loss aversion, the same force behind the 1929 margin wipeout, explains modern crashes in GameStop, bitcoin, and the 2025 tariff sell-off.A concrete way to notice when herd behavior, not information, is driving your next trade.=================================Information in this episode does not constitute financial advice and is for educational purposes only. Aidan Lewis is not a financial professional. Investing and trading in the stock market carries inherent risk that needs to be understood by the investor. Invest at your own risk. =================================Primary SourcesKahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291. https://doi.org/10.2307/1914185Barber, B. M., & Odean, T. Trading is Hazardous to Your Wealth: The Common Stock Investment Performance of Individual Investors. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.219228Kumar, A. (2008). Who Gambles in the Stock Market? Journal of Finance. https://ssrn.com/abstract=686022Barberis, N., & Thaler, R. (2002). A Survey of Behavioral Finance. NBER Working Paper 9222. https://doi.org/10.3386/w9222Secondary SourcesFed history: 1929 crash essayFisher's "permanently high plateau" speechBritannica: causes of the Depression1920s margin buying, laissez-faire policyHerding behavior review, 1929 crashBritannica: banking panics 1930-33Bank failures, money supply contraction 1929-33Smoot-Hawley timeline, banking panics by year
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    31 分
  • E10: How JFK Leveraged Social Perception to stop the Cuban Missile Crisis

    E10: How JFK Leveraged Social Perception to stop the Cuban Missile Crisis
    2026/07/28
    October 1962. Nine men in a windowless room have mere days to stop a nuclear war neither side actually wants – but neither side can be seen to lose. Two Soviet letters arrive within a day of each other, one conciliatory, one a hardline ultimatum. And with a U.S. pilot being shot dead over Cuba, the clock is now measured in hours, not days. What President Kennedy and his advisors chose to do next reshaped how the U.S. and USSR would communicate for the rest of the Cold War – and almost nobody knew the real deal for decades.ExComm received two Soviet demands to end the standoff – a conciliatory private letter on Friday and a more a public, hardline demand was broadcasted from Radio Moscow on Black Saturday – coinciding with Major Rudolf Anderson's U-2 being shot down over Cuban airspace.Through a quantum cognition lens, four concepts explain how ExComm found a way out. Superposition reframed the decision from a binary blockade-or-invade choice into a richer set of hidden options for which Soviet letter to answer, and how. Interference came from the tension between projecting strength and avoiding cornering the soviets into a worse response – the same interference pattern shaping today's geopolitics. Contextuality mattered because the Bay of Pigs failure, looming midterm elections, and the broader Cold War all pulled the decision in different directions at once. And non-commutative effects – the order in which the two letters and the shootdown arrived – changed how ExComm interpreted Soviet intent. Rather than picking one path, Kennedy combined them: publicly honoring the conciliatory letter, privately trading Turkey-based missiles for Cuba's, giving both superpowers a win at home.=================================What you'll take away:Why treating a negotiation as more than two options can reveal a de-escalating third path neither side saw at firstHow the order in which information arrives can change what a decision seems to demand, even when the facts themselves don't changeWhy visible confidence in a decision shapes whether others resist it or fall in line behind it=================================Primary Sources:Mojzisch, A., & Krug, K. (2008). Cells, circuits, and choices: social influences on perceptual decision making. Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, 8(4), 498–508. https://doi.org/10.3758/CABN.8.4.498Saha Roy, T., Giri, B., Saha Chowdhury, A., Mazumder, S., & Das, K. (2020). How our perception and confidence are altered using decision cues. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 13, 1371. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2019.01371Thompson, L., & Hastie, R. (1990). Social perception in negotiation. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 47(1), 98–123. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(90)90048-ESecondary Sources:Cuban missile crisis decision-making lessonsCuban missile crisis irrational factors historiographyKhrushchev emotional decision-making OxfordEssence of Decision, Graham AllisonNuclear deterrence anomaly scholars lessonsMirroring Risk, Renshon missile estimationWise leadership Cuban missile crisis case studyJFK groupthink origin, Bay of PigsJFK White House tape recordingsRobert Kennedy Cuban missile crisis reinterpretationJFK Library Cuban missile crisis chronologyJFK Library October 27 day-by-dayState Department Cuban missile crisis milestonesJupiter missiles sealing the deal, Wilson CenterHow Anderson's death may have prevented nuclear warThirteen Days on quarantine decision, On The IssuesBlockade decision as consequence analysisKennedy's September 1962 political warning, NSA1962 October surprise midterm electionEpisode Tags / Keywords Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK, ExComm, Black Saturday, quantum cognition, decision science, Cold War, Nikita Khrushchev, nuclear deterrence, groupthink, negotiation theory, behavioral psychology, cognitive bias, foreign policy decision-making, Bay of Pigs, social perception
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    26 分
  • E9: FIFA's Collapse – How Scandal Delivered the 2026 World Cup

    E9: FIFA's Collapse – How Scandal Delivered the 2026 World Cup
    2026/07/21
    A perfect case study for decision in uncertainty, and decisions by default.In 2016, Gianni Infantino inherited the presidency of FIFA after watching 41 colleagues get hauled away by Swiss and U.S. authorities in a $150 million bribery scandal. Two years later, his organization had to hand the biggest prize in sports – hosting rights to the 2026 World Cup – to the only nation left in the superposition once the old context had vanished with the police sirens. North America provided the certainty in the uncertain environment FIFA found themselves.From 1990 to 2015, FIFA executives ran a 24-year racket, taking bribes tied to media rights, sponsorships, and World Cup hosting votes going back to France's 1998 win. The scheme unraveled when Chuck Blazer, a FIFA executive committee member facing over a decade of unreported income, agreed to wear an FBI wire instead of prison. His evidence led to the arrest of seven FIFA officials in Zurich in May 2015 – days before Sepp Blatter's re-election bid – and eventually 41 arrests and 14 convictions for racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering. Blatter resigned days after winning re-election; his chosen successor, Michel Platini, was banned over a mysterious $2 million "delayed consultation fee." That left the field open for Gianni Infantino, who expanded the World Cup to 48 teams and opened the hosting vote to FIFA's full 203-member congress – setting up the exact contextual conditions that handed North America the 2026 bid over Morocco.Run through the quantum cognition framework, this decision is a clean case study in contextuality. The superposition started with two bids – North America and Morocco. Interference came from a congress reeling after watching 41 colleagues arrested, desperate to look clean. But contextuality did the heavy lifting: a scandal exposed by the U.S. itself, a newly expanded 48-team format requiring infrastructure only one bidder actually had, and a congress with every incentive to align with the nation holding leverage over the rest of them. Layer in non-commutative effects – the order these shocks hit FIFA in – and the superposition doesn't just narrow, it collapses to one outcome before the vote is even called.=================================What you'll take away:Why "decisions by default" emerge when uncertainty spikes – and how certainty-seeking, not merit, decided the 2026 hostHow contextual collapse works at scale, across a 203-member congressional vote, the same way it works in a single choiceWhy breaking an old context is terrifying but is also the moment the most options ever enter your own superposition=================================Primary Sources:Platt, M. L., & Huettel, S. A. (2008). Risky business: the neuroeconomics of decision making under uncertainty. Nature neuroscience, 11(4), 398–403. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn2062 Preuschoff, K., Mohr, P. N., & Hsu, M. (2013). Decision making under uncertainty. Frontiers in neuroscience, 7, 218. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2013.00218 Yu, J., Liu, X., Yu, J. et al. Neural investigation of default effects on decision-making under uncertainty. Sci Rep 16, 10233 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-41206-x Secondary Sources:List of FIFA World Cup hosts2026 FIFA World Cup overview2026 FIFA World Cup bidding processFIFA World Cup 2026 official site2026 FIFA World Cup bids WikipediaAl Jazeera: why three co-hosts2015 FIFA corruption caseFIFA bidding postponement amid scandal2015 FIFA corruption scandal - BritannicaInfantino's FIFA: ten years of power and politicsForbes – World Cup Revenue Stats2022 World Cup EngagementEpisode Tags / Keywords FIFA corruption scandal, Sepp Blatter, Gianni Infantino, Chuck Blazer, 2026 World Cup, quantum cognition, decision science, contextuality, decision making under uncertainty, behavioral psychology, cognitive bias, North America World Cup bid, FIFA scandal explained, sports corruption, decisions by default, superposition
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    20 分
  • E8: Deep Dive Into Quantum Cognition – The Irrational Physics of How You Think

    E8: Deep Dive Into Quantum Cognition – The Irrational Physics of How You Think
    2026/07/14

    Linda is 31, outspoken, and marched against nuclear weapons in college. Ask people whether she's more likely to be a bank teller, or a bank teller AND a feminist, and almost everyone picks the second option – a statistical impossibility. Classical models of the mind call this an error. Quantum cognition calls it a clue. Today we go deep into the framework that treats the irrational parts of human decision-making not as glitches, but as evidence that the mind runs on the same probabilistic logic as subatomic particles.


    This isn't a metaphor – it's a modeling framework built directly from the mathematics of quantum mechanics. We trace why classical, Bayesian-based models of cognition – heuristics, biases, the whole toolkit – started running into walls, and how a quantum approach fills the gaps: explaining the Linda problem, the prisoner's dilemma, and decades of decisions that don't follow the rules of classical probability.


    We break down three of quantum cognition's four core pillars. Superposition, where a mind holds multiple, competing beliefs at once as a single combined state – not yet resolved into a decision. Interference, where those competing beliefs collide, sometimes amplifying each other (constructive interference) and sometimes canceling each other out (destructive interference), reshaping the outcome before a choice is even made. And contextuality, where the surrounding frame of a decision changes both what's being considered and how those competing beliefs interact. We close on the frontier concepts researchers are still working out: entanglement, order effects, measurement effects, and the speculative case for cognitive tunneling.

    =================================

    What you'll take away:

    - Why the Linda problem and the prisoner's dilemma reveal a consistent, non-random pattern of "irrationality" that classical probability can't account for

    - How superposition and interference mechanistically explain why the order and framing of information changes the decision itself, not just how it's perceived

    - Why contextuality means there's no such thing as a decision made in a vacuum – the frame is part of the math

    =================================

    Primary Sources:

    Pothos, E. M., & Busemeyer, J. R. (2022). Quantum cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 73, 749–778. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-033020-123501

    Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1983). Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgment. Psychological Review, 90(4), 293–315. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.90.4.29

    Cervantes, V. H., & Dzhafarov, E. N. (2018). Snow Queen is evil and beautiful: Experimental evidence for probabilistic contextuality in human choices. Decision, 5(3), 193–204. https://doi.org/10.1037/dec0000095

    Busemeyer, J. R., Pothos, E. M., Franco, R., & Trueblood, J. S. (2011). A quantum theoretical explanation for probability judgment errors. Psychological Review, 118(2), 193–218. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022542

    McKenzie, C.R.M., Lee, S.M. and Chen, K.K. (2002), When negative evidence increases confidence: change in belief after hearing two sides of a dispute. J. Behav. Decis. Making, 15: 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.400

    Bergus, G. R., Levin, I. P., & Elstein, A. S. (2002). Presenting risks and benefits to patients. Journal of general internal medicine, 17(8), 612–617. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1525-1497.2002.11001.x

    Moore, D. W. (2002). Measuring new types of question-order effects: Additive and subtractive. Public Opinion Quarterly, 66(1), 80–91. https://doi.org/10.1086/338631

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    Secondary Sources:

    Qognitive

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    Episode Tags / Keywords:

    quantum cognition, decision science, cognitive bias, Linda problem, conjunction fallacy, prisoner's dilemma, disjunction effect, superposition, interference effects, contextuality, behavioral psychology, Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Emmanuel Pothos, Jerome Busemeyer, quantum probability
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    39 分