Modeling Human Decision-making: An Overview of the Brussels Quantum Approach

TL;DR

This paper reviews the quantum theoretical approach to modeling human decision-making and cognition, demonstrating its success in explaining phenomena that classical models cannot, through concepts like superposition and entanglement.

Contribution

It introduces a quantum formalism for cognitive modeling, extending it to explain reasoning fallacies as quantum effects, offering an alternative to heuristic-based explanations.

Findings

Quantum models successfully represent concept combinations and logical fallacies.

Human reasoning involves superposition of emergent and logical processes.

Quantum structures like entanglement explain reasoning fallacies.

Abstract

We present the fundamentals of the quantum theoretical approach we have developed in the last decade to model cognitive phenomena that resisted modeling by means of classical logical and probabilistic structures, like Boolean, Kolmogorovian and, more generally, set theoretical structures. We firstly sketch the operational-realistic foundations of conceptual entities, i.e. concepts, conceptual combinations, propositions, decision-making entities, etc. Then, we briefly illustrate the application of the quantum formalism in Hilbert space to represent combinations of natural concepts, discussing its success in modeling a wide range of empirical data on concepts and their conjunction, disjunction and negation. Next, we naturally extend the quantum theoretical approach to model some long-standing `fallacies of human reasoning', namely, the `conjunction fallacy' and the `disjunction effect'. Finally, we put forward an explanatory hypothesis according to which human reasoning is a defined superposition of `emergent reasoning' and `logical reasoning', where the former generally prevails over the latter. The quantum theoretical approach explains human fallacies as the consequence of genuine quantum structures in human reasoning, i.e. `contextuality', `emergence', `entanglement', `interference' and `superposition'. As such, it is alternative to the Kahneman-Tversky research programme, which instead aims to explain human fallacies in terms of `individual heuristics and biases'.