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.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Friday, May 26th
Afternoon
So, about noon or so, we finally got to the American Museum of Natural History. I was pretty smart, actually... A few months ago, when we first started thinking about making this trip, I decided not to renew my subscription to Natural History Magazine, but to subscribe…
Monty Hall strikes again!
Today's New York Times has this article, by John Tierney, about the latest wrinkle in the Monty Hall problem. According to M. Keith Chen, an economist at Yale University, the results of certain psychological studies are called into question by a sytematic error in their…
My latest book project has been coediting the proceedings of the 2013 MOVES Conference held in New York City, which has turned out to be a lot harder than I anticipated. For the last few weeks it's been all-consuming, and spending so many hours in front of the computer staring at other people's…
Janet Stemwedel and Chad Orzel have each written excellent posts on the necessity of improving science journalism. Janet argues that what's needed is to improve science education:
If there were an actual clamor for science reporting that was detailed, informative, and grounded in fact -- a clamor…
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?