Contextuality in Human Decision Making in the Presence of Direct Influences: A Comment on Basieva et al. (2019)

TL;DR

This paper critiques a recent study claiming evidence of contextuality in human decision making, arguing that the data can be explained by direct influences and that the evidence is inconclusive for true contextuality.

Contribution

It demonstrates that experimental data interpreted as contextuality can be explained by non-contextual models with direct influences, challenging prior claims.

Findings

A non-contextual model explains the experimental data.

The definition of signalling used is insufficient to rule out direct influences.

Experimental data in psychology may not conclusively demonstrate contextuality.

Abstract

In a recent paper Basieva, Cervantes, Dzhafarov, and Khrennikov (2019) presented a series of experiments which they claimed show evidence for contextuality in human judgments. This was based on a set of modified Bell-like inequalities designed to rule out effects caused by signalling. In this comment we show that it is, however, possible to construct a non-contextual model which explains the experimental data via direct influences, which we take to mean that a measurement outcome has a (model-specific) causal dependence on other measurements. We trace the apparent inconsistency to a definition of signalling which does not account for all possible forms of direct influence. Further, we cast doubt on the idea that any experimental data in psychology could provide conclusive evidence for contextuality beyond that explainable by direct influence.