Monte Hall and Cognitive Dissonance

Did the Monte Hall problem, trip up a huge number of psychologists? So claims this New York Times article. For a good detailed explanation see here. For even more detail see the actual paper.

More like this

The money quote: I doubt that his critique will be all that influential for the field of cognitive dissonance more broadly.

Independent proof of CD?

Pieter, there are a variety of other lines of evidence for the existence, nature and extent of cognitive dissonance so it isn't like that this point will that large an influence on matters. It doesn't take any cognitive dissonance to think that. Indeed, I suspect that if this phenomenon were not confirmed by other lines of evidence someone would have noticed this problem already.

What's interesting about the article is that the answer goes against our intuition that, with two unopened doors left, the odds are 50-50 that the car is behind one of them. Your first guess has a one in three chance of being right, but the second happens 2 out of 3 times.
What do you think?

By Michael Bacon (not verified) on 08 Apr 2008 #permalink