This new book by Emmanuel Haven and Andrei Khrennikov argues that information processing in social systems can to a degree be formalized with the mathematical apparatus of quantum mechanics. This is a novel approach. Understanding decision making is a central objective of economics and finance and the quantum like approach proposed here, is used as a tool to enrich the formalism of such decision making. Emmanuel and Andrei argue for instance that probability interference can be used to explain the violation of the law of total probability in well known paradoxes like the Ellsberg decision making paradox. Emmanuel and Andrei's book forms one of the very first contributions in a very novel area of research. I hope this book can open the road for many new books to come. More new results are needed, especially in the area of decision making. H. Eugene Stanley William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor; Professor of Physics; Professor of Chemistry; Professor of Biomedical Engineering; Professor of Physiology (School of Medicine) Director, Center for Polymer Studies, Department of Physics, Boston University By chance a few days before Andrei Khrennikov and Emmanuel Haven asked me to write this Foreword to their new book Quantum Social Science , I was browsing the collected works of Wolfgang Pauli, Writings on Physics and Philosophy , eds. Charles P. Enz and Karl von Meyenn, Springer (1994).
This new book by Emmanuel Haven and Andrei Khrennikov argues that information processing in social systems can to a degree be formalized with the mathematical apparatus of quantum mechanics. This is a novel approach. Understanding decision making is a central objective of economics and finance and the quantum like approach proposed here, is used as a tool to enrich the formalism of such decision making. Emmanuel and Andrei argue for instance that probability interference can be used to explain the violation of the law of total probability in well known paradoxes like the Ellsberg decision making paradox. Emmanuel and Andrei's book forms one of the very first contributions in a very novel area of research. I hope this book can open the road for many new books to come. More new results are needed, especially in the area of decision making. H. Eugene Stanley William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor; Professor of Physics; Professor of Chemistry; Professor of Biomedical Engineering; Professor of Physiology (School of Medicine) Director, Center for Polymer Studies, Department of Physics, Boston University By chance a few days before Andrei Khrennikov and Emmanuel Haven asked me to write this Foreword to their new book Quantum Social Science , I was browsing the collected works of Wolfgang Pauli, Writings on Physics and Philosophy , eds. Charles P. Enz and Karl von Meyenn, Springer (1994).
This book deals with applications of quantum mechanical techniques to areas outside of quantum mechanics, so-called quantum-like modeling. Research in this area has grown over the last 15 years. But even already more than 50 years ago, the interaction between Physics Nobelist Pauli and the psychologist Carl Jung in the 1950's on seeking to find analogous uses of the complementarity principle from quantum mechanics in psychology needs noting. This book does NOT want to advance that society is quantum mechanical! The macroscopic world is manifestly not quantum mechanical. But this rules not out that one can use concepts and the mathematical apparatus from quantum physics in a macroscopic environment. A mainstay ingredient of quantum mechanics, is 'quantum probability' and this tool has been proven to be useful in the mathematical modelling of decision making. In the most basic experiment of quantum physics, the double slit experiment, it is known (from the works of A. Khrennikov) that the law of total probability is violated. It is now well documented that several decision making paradoxes in psychology and economics (such as the Ellsberg paradox) do exhibit this violation of the law of total probability. When data is collected with experiments which test 'non-rational' decision making behaviour, one can observe that such data often exhibits a complex non-commutative structure, which may be even more complex than if one considers the structure allied to the basic two slit experiment. The community exploring quantum-like models has tried to address how quantum probability can help in better explaining those paradoxes. Research has now been published in very high standing journals on resolving some of the paradoxes with the mathematics of quantum physics. The aim of this book is to collect the contributions of world's leading experts in quantum like modeling in decision making, psychology, cognition, economics, and finance.
Written by world experts in the foundations of quantum mechanics and its applications to social science, this book shows how elementary quantum mechanical principles can be applied to decision-making paradoxes in psychology and used in modelling information in finance and economics. The book starts with a thorough overview of some of the salient differences between classical, statistical and quantum mechanics. It presents arguments on why quantum mechanics can be applied outside of physics and defines quantum social science. The issue of the existence of quantum probabilistic effects in psychology, economics and finance is addressed and basic questions and answers are provided. Aimed at researchers in economics and psychology, as well as physics, basic mathematical preliminaries and elementary concepts from quantum mechanics are defined in a self-contained way.
Professor Andrei Khrennikov (Linnaeus University – Sweden) and Professor Emmanuel Haven (Memorial University of Newfoundland – Canada) utilise the mathematical framework of quantum theory to offer novel insights into the complexities of biological systems, cognition, decision-making, and other areas of social science, such as economics and finance. Their work showcases the potential of quantum-like models to decode the intricacies of non-physical systems, paving the way for innovative approaches to understanding the dynamics of life and thought, social processes and financial markets.
This concise and self-contained book opens completely novel areas of research by directly implementing concepts from quantum physics into areas of social science. It constructs compelling arguments originating from fundamental concepts in physics and the philosophy of science, including key developments in economics and finance, then surveys the important work which has been performed to date through applying the formalism of quantum mechanics to decision making and finance. The book is accessible to graduate students and researchers in social science and physics, as well as avid interdisciplinary readers. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
The present thesis (mostly) concerns the application of alternative mathematical methods to understand patterns in human cognition and to model them. The different chapters presented in this thesis show research that concerns the application of quantum probability (QP) theory in the modeling of human decision-making. Quantum probability (QP) theory is a theory for how to assign probabilities to events. QP theory can be thought of as the probability rules from quantum mechanics, without any of the physics. This work is not about the application of quantum physics to brain physiology. Rather, we are interested in QP theory as a mathematical framework for cognitive modelling. This theory is potentially relevant in any behavioural situation that involves uncertainty. QP theory is analogous to classical probability theory, though QP theory and classical probability (CP) theory are founded from different sets of axioms (the Kolmogorov and Dirac/von Neumann axioms respectively) and so are subject to alternative constraints. In this thesis we show that especially over the last decade, there has been a growing interest in decision-making and cognitive models using a quantum probabilistic (QP) framework. We see how this development encompasses publications in major journals (see Pothos and Busemeyer, 2013; Wang et al., 2014; and Yearsley and Pothos, 2014; among others), special issues, and dedicated workshops, as well as several comprehensive books (Busemeyer and Bruza, 2012; Khrennikov, 2010; and Haven and Khrennikov, 2010). However, uncertainty itself is neither ethical nor unethical – yet it is inherent to most situations in which, for instance, moral judgments and decisions have to be made. For a descriptive understanding of judgment and decisions in moral situations, it is an important lesson to acknowledge both the cognitive side (bounded rationality) and the environment (ecological rationality) – and thus the uncertainty of the world and how the mind deals with it. This thesis also shows significant interest in moral and social psychology. Specifically, we consider present technologies that suggest a need for evaluating alternative contexts for ethical decision-making. How the research on human-machine interaction feeds back into humans’ understanding of themselves as moral agents? This key question ultimately relates to the nature of ethical theory itself. Overall, this dissertation presents and addresses not only standard aspects of decision- making processes, such as similarity judgments (Chapters 1 to 4) or the constructive role of articulating impressions (Chapter 5), but also standard aspects of social psychology, such as moral judgments (Chapters 6 and 7) and game theory (Chapter 8). As stated in the Declarations section, the present thesis is a combination of a standard and a publication- based dissertation.
The application of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics to model behavioral patterns in social science and economics is a novel and constantly emerging field. The aim of the so called 'quantum like' models is to model the decision making processes in a macroscopic setting, capturing the particular 'context' in which the decisions are taken. Several subsequent empirical findings proved that when making a decision people tend to violate the axioms of expected utility theory and Savage's Sure Thing principle, thus violating the law of total probability. A quantum probability formula was devised to describe more accurately the decision making processes. A next step in the development of QL-modeling in decision making was the application of Schrödinger equation to describe the evolution of people's mental states. A shortcoming of Schrödinger equation is its inability to capture dynamics of an open system; the brain of the decision maker can be regarded as such, actively interacting with the external environment. Recently the master equation, by which quantum physics describes the process of decoherence as the result of interaction of the mental state with the environmental 'bath', was introduced for modeling the human decision making. The external environment and memory can be referred to as a complex 'context' influencing the final decision outcomes. The master equation can be considered as a pioneering and promising apparatus for modeling the dynamics of decision making in different contexts.