Editorial: Quantum Structures in Cognitive and Social Science

摘要

A fundamental problem in cognitive and social science concerns the identification of the principles guiding human cognitive acts such as decision-making, categorization, and behavior under uncertainty. Identifying these mechanisms would have manifold implications for fields ranging from psychology to economics, finance, politics, computer science, and artificial intelligence. The predominant theoretical paradigm rests on a classical conception of logic and probability theory. According to this paradigm people make decisions by following the rules of Boole's logic, while the probabilistic aspects of these decisions can be formalized by Kolmogorov's probability theory. This classical approach was believed to provide a quite complete and accurate account of human decision-making at both a normative level (describing what people should do) and a descriptive level (describing what people actually do). However, starting from the seventies, experimental studies of conceptual categorization, human judgment and perception, and behavioral economics have revealed that this classical conception is fundamentally problematical, in the sense that the cognitive models based on these mathematical structures are not capable of capturing how humans make decisions in situations involving uncertainty. In the last decade, an alternative scientific paradigm has arisen that employs a different and more general modeling scheme; it uses the mathematical formalism of quantum theory to model situations and processes in cognitive and social science. This new approach has not only met with considerable success but is becoming increasingly accepted in the scientific community, having attracted interest from important scientists, top journals, funding institutions, and media. Prisoners' dilemmas, conjunction and disjunction fallacies, disjunction effects, violations of the Sure-Thing principle, Allais, Ellsberg and Machina paradoxes, are only some of the examples where the application of the quantum mechanical formalism has shown significant effectiveness over traditional modeling schemes of a classical type.