True Contextuality Beats Direct Influences in Human Decision Making

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates true contextuality in human decision making through crowdsourcing experiments, showing that some behaviors cannot be explained solely by direct influences, unlike previous studies.

Contribution

It presents new experimental evidence of true contextuality in human judgments, extending the application of the Contextuality-by-Default theory.

Findings

All previous human judgment studies' context-dependence explained by direct influences.

New experiments show clear evidence of true contextuality in simple decisions.

Demonstrates that human decision making can exhibit quantum-like contextuality.

Abstract

In quantum physics there are well-known situations when measurements of the same property in different contexts (under different conditions) have the same probability distribution, but cannot be represented by one and the same random variable. Such systems of random variables are called contextual. More generally, true contextuality is observed when different contexts force measurements of the same property (in psychology, responses to the same question) to be more dissimilar random variables than warranted by the difference of their distributions. The difference in distributions is itself a form of context-dependence, but of another nature: it is attributable to direct causal influences exerted by contexts upon the random variables. The Contextuality-by-Default (CbD) theory allows one to separate true contextuality from direct influences in the overall context-dependence. The CbD analysis of numerous previous attempts to demonstrate contextuality in human judgments shows that all context-dependence in them can be accounted for by direct influences, with no true contextuality present. However, contextual systems in human behavior can be found. In this paper we present a series of crowdsourcing experiments that exhibit true contextuality in simple decision making.}{The design of these experiments is an elaboration of one introduced in the "Snow Queen" experiment (Decision 5, 193-204, 2018), where contextuality was for the first time demonstrated unequivocally.