The US political system in the recent years has been mainly formed by a Divided Government, which is regarded as a consequence of 'non-separability' of voters' preferences. The non- separability phenomenon emerges as a result of strong correlations that the voters establish between their preferences for the Congress and the White House contests. We investigate with help of the empirical data from the Smith et al (1999 J. Polit. Sci. 43 737–764) study what implications the upcoming information (encoded in the observables- questions) has on the non- separability emergence. We show that the informational context of the questions alters the preference frequencies that cannot be captured in a classical probabilistic framework. We attribute the changes to the incompatibility of observables C and P, which correspond to questions being asked. We embed our data in a quantum framework and model the voters' mental state evolution as it is impacted by the operators, to show the non-commutativity of the transition probabilities as a result of the question order effect.
The US political system in the recent years has been mainly formed by a Divided Government, which is regarded as a consequence of 'non-separability' of voters' preferences. The non- separability phenomenon emerges as a result of strong correlations that the voters establish between their preferences for the Congress and the White House contests. We investigate with help of the empirical data from the Smith et al (1999 J. Polit. Sci. 43 737–764) study what implications the upcoming information (encoded in the observables- questions) has on the non- separability emergence. We show that the informational context of the questions alters the preference frequencies that cannot be captured in a classical probabilistic framework. We attribute the changes to the incompatibility of observables C and P, which correspond to questions being asked. We embed our data in a quantum framework and model the voters' mental state evolution as it is impacted by the operators, to show the non-commutativity of the transition probabilities as a result of the question order effect.
We search to devise a new paradigm borrowed from concepts and mathematical tools of quantum physics, to model the decision-making process of the US electorate. The statistical data of the election outcomes in the period between 2008 and 2014 is analysed, in order to explore in more depth the emergence of the so-called divided government. There is an increasing urge in the political literature which indicates that preference reversal (strictly speaking the violation of the transitivity axiom) is a consequence of the so-called non-separability phenomenon (i.e. a strong interrelation of choices). In the political science literature, non-separable behaviour is characterized by a conditioning of decisions on the outcomes of some issues of interest. An additional source of preference reversal is ascribed to the time dynamics of the voters' cognitive states, in the context of new upcoming political information. As we discuss in this paper, the primary source of political information can be attributed to the mass media. In order to shed more light on the phenomenon of preference reversal among the US electorate, we accommodate the obtained statistical data in a classical probabilistic (Kolmogorovian) scheme. Based on the obtained results, we attribute the strong ties between the voters non-separable decisions that cannot be explained by conditioning with the Bayes scheme, to the quantum phenomenon of entanglement. Second, we compute the degree of interference of voters' belief states with the aid of the quantum analogue of the formula of total probability. Lastly, a model, based on the quantum master equation, to incorporate the impact of the mass media bath is proposed.
Politics is regarded as a vital area of social science and strongly relies on the assumptions of voters’ rationality and as such the stability of preferences (at least in decisions that are made simultaneously). The phenomenon of divided government that has dominated the US political arena for many election periods over the last 40 years is not consistent with the notion of stable preferences of voters. The authors claim that there is no well defined ranking of their preferences on their utility function of “political preferences.” Recently, this problem has been handled by using the novel approach based on the formalism of quantum mechanics. The theory of quantum decision-making is applicable to the modeling of irrational and biased behavior of voters as well as to the nonseparability of their preferences. Irrationality, biases, and nonseparability lead to a deeper uncertainty than classical probabilistic uncertainty. In particular, quantum probability describes well the violation of Bayesian rationality. The authors model this nonclassical uncertainty in voters’ preferences by using elements of the fundamental quantum information structures such as superposition and entanglement. The chapter is an introduction to the quantum modeling of the behavior of an electorate with unstable preferences (contextual preferences) and the authors use one of the most potent theories of adaptive dynamics, namely, the theory of open quantum systems. In this model a voter’s decision is created in the process of interaction with an information bath in which the mass media play the key role. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Politics is regarded as a vital area of public choice theory, and it is strongly relying on the assumptions of voters’ rationality and as such, stability of preferences. However, recent opinion polls and real election outcomes in the USA have shown that voters often engage in ‘ticket splitting’, by exhibiting contrasting party support in Congressional and Presidential elections (cf. Khrennikova 2014Phys. ScriptaT163, 014010 ( doi:10.1088/0031-8949/2014/T163/014010 ); Khrennikova & Haven 2016Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A374, 20150106 ( doi:10.1098/rsta.2015.0106 ); Smithet al.1999Am. J. Polit. Sci.43, 737–764 ( doi:10.2307/2991833 )). Such types of preference reversals cannot be mathematically captured via the formula of total probability, thus showing that voters’ decision making is at variance with the classical probabilistic information processing framework. In recent work, we have shown that quantum probability describes well the violation of Bayesian rationality in statistical data of voting in US elections, through the so-calledinterference effectsof probability amplitudes. This paper is proposing a novel generalized observables framework of voting behaviour, by using the statistical data collected and analysed in previous studies by Khrennikova (Khrennikova 2015Lect. Notes Comput. Sci.8951, 196–209) and Khrennikova & Haven (Khrennikova & Haven 2016Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A374, 20150106 ( doi:10.1098/rsta.2015.0106 )). This framework aims to overcome the main problems associated with the quantum probabilistic representation of psychological data, namely thenon-double stochasticityof transition probability matrices. We develop a simplified construction of generalized positive operator valued measures by formulating special non-orthonormal bases with respect to these operators. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Second quantum revolution: foundational questions’.
Classical models of opinion dynamics represent individual opinions as scalar or vector values governed by the classical probability theory, either as deterministic quantities or random variables. This framework does not account for empirically observed phenomena such as cognitive ambivalence (where an individual simultaneously holds conflicting views) and order effects (where survey responses depend on the order in which questions are asked). We propose a quantum model of opinion dynamics in which each agent's cognitive state is represented by a density matrix that encodes both the expressed opinion and cognitive ambivalence. Survey questions become non-commuting self-adjoint operators, which provides a principled explanation for order effects. Our model also identifies quantities without classical counterparts, including quantum coherence and pairwise opinion covariances. Under a product state approximation, the quantum model reduces to the classical Friedkin--Johnsen opinion model. We test the framework on synthetic and real-world networks and observe that pairwise correlations follow network-dependent transient dynamics but converge to the same steady state regardless of the network, and that quantum coherence decays exponentially at a rate independent of the network.
This paper is devoted to the application of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics to social (political) science. By using the quantum dynamical equations we model the process of decision making in US elections. The crucial point we attempt to make is that the voter's mental state can be represented as a superposition of two possible choices for either republicans or democrats. However, reality dictates a more complicated situation: typically a voter participates in two elections, i.e. the congress and the presidential elections. In both elections he/she has to decide between two choices. This very feature of the US election system requires that the mental state is represented by a 2-qubit state corresponding to the superposition of 4 different choices (e.g. for republicans in the congress; for the president as a democrat). The main issue of this paper is to describe the dynamics of the voters' mental states taking in account the mental and socio- political environment. What is truly novel in this paper is that instead of using Schrödinger's equation to describe the dynamics in an absence of interactions, we here apply the quantum master equation. This equation describes quantum decoherence, i.e., resolution from superposition to a definite choice.
The hypothesis that human reasoning obeys the laws of quantum rather than classical probability has been used in recent years to explain a variety of seemingly "irrational" judgment and decision-making findings. This article provides independent evidence for this hypothesis based on an a priori prediction, called the quantum question (QQ) equality, concerning the effect of asking attitude questions successively in different orders. We empirically evaluated the predicted QQ equality using 70 national representative surveys and two laboratory experiments that manipulated question orders. Each national study contained 651-3,006 participants. The results provided strong support for the predicted QQ equality. These findings suggest that quantum probability theory, initially invented to explain noncommutativity of measurements in physics, provides a simple account for a surprising regularity regarding measurement order effects in social and behavioral science.