Belief and Surprise - A Belief-Function Formulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a belief-function framework modeling human belief as a binary state with confidence levels, linking belief, confidence, and surprise in a formal theory inspired by human cognition.

Contribution

It develops a novel belief-function formulation that captures the binary nature of belief and the role of confidence in predicting surprise upon disconfirmation.

Findings

Belief is modeled as a binary state with an associated confidence level.

Agents are predicted to be surprised proportionally to their confidence when a belief is disconfirmed.

The theory provides a formal link between belief, confidence, and surprise in human cognition.

Abstract

We motivate and describe a theory of belief in this paper. This theory is developed with the following view of human belief in mind. Consider the belief that an event E will occur (or has occurred or is occurring). An agent either entertains this belief or does not entertain this belief (i.e., there is no "grade" in entertaining the belief). If the agent chooses to exercise "the will to believe" and entertain this belief, he/she/it is entitled to a degree of confidence c (1 > c > 0) in doing so. Adopting this view of human belief, we conjecture that whenever an agent entertains the belief that E will occur with c degree of confidence, the agent will be surprised (to the extent c) upon realizing that E did not occur.