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Cognitive Dissonance in Monkeys - The Monty Hall Problem
- lkozma 19y agoSummary: one shouldn't assume uniform prior distributions in psychological experiments. Bayes-rule is your friend.
- jgrahamc 19y agoTo quote the article: "He says the psychologists wrongly assumed that the monkey began by valuing all three colors equally." So, basically psychologists are dumb; why assume that monkeys have no color preference? Even if you don't think they've got any intelligence, you could probably assume that they have some knowledge of colors associated with looking for food.
- philh 19y agoBut also from the article: "After identifying three colors preferred about equally by a monkey -" They didn't assume there were no preferences. Their mistake was to assume they could measure them precisely enough.
- gojomo 19y agoThis monkey thinks that perceived novelty/rarity could also explain the green-preference. When at the second forced-choice, blue has appeared in 2-of-4 positions, while both red and green have only appeared in 1-of-4 positions each. Further, blue has always been at least one choice. That makes it look common, so less interesting.
- philh 19y agoThe actual paper is linked at http://www.som.yale.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers.htm http://www.som.yale.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers.htm The article doesn't give what seems to be a pretty important detail. Children and monkeys chose the new item 63 and 60% of the time, respectively. That suggests buyer's remorse rather than choice rationalisation, but only small amounts. Possibly not even significant, depending on the sample size.
- slapshot 19y agoThere are 2 kinds of people in the world: Those behind Door #1 who don't understand the Monty Hall problem, and those behind Doors #2 and 3 who do. It's amazing how many smart people don't get the problem at all.
- amichail 19y agoPaul Erdos got it wrong (!).
- lkozma 19y agoAs someone explained earlier on News.yc (can't find the link), Paul Erdos (and possibly other mathematicians) got it "wrong" because they weren't told the correct problem. If you don't mention that: (1) the game host knows where the car is beforehand (2) he tells beforehand that he'll reveal a goat, then there's no paradox.
- baha_man 19y agoDo you mean this thread? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=78322 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=78322 I haven't read the book mentioned so I can't comment, perhaps someone else can.