And Behind Door No. 1, a Fatal Flaw - The New York Times

Monty Hall Meets Cognitive Dissonance - TierneyLab - Science - New York Times Blog

OK so there are two issues here:
1. the Monty Hall Problem itself. should you 'change' your choice?

#Cognitive Dissonance in Monkeys: The Monty Hall Problem -By John Tierney, New York Times 8 April
cathy brought newspaper for me bcs talkd abt w ERosenbrg ?I remembr Chinese restaurnt West St.?/ 1in3 chance y chose correct door. aftr Monty opens 1ofothr2, y shld change choice bcs now 1in2 ~hmm.no,now 1in2 whethr"change"or not./wrong- cf blog mrkd abv
to z0804 item-archv

#Monty Hall Meets Cognitive Dissonance -TierneyLab-Science-NewYorkTimesBlog:
ok wh change problem to 1in52 chance reduced to the final 1in2 chance (deck of cards, y pick one, he takes away 50 th are not the AceofHearts, then you pick btw yrs & his: wh is the Ace?) does seem obviously better to 'change' choice.

and
2. what is Cognitive Dissonance Theory and how is Monty Hall Problem relevant?

#And Behind Door No. 1, a Fatal Flaw - Brijit Abstract :Supporters of cognitive dissonance point to experiments suggesting that once we reject an option, we modify future behavior rather than acknowledge that we chose incorrectly.
cogndiss= ignore info contradicts beliefs /good. article itslf not clear re relevance MH to cogn diss. choosing a door ~not correct/incorrect, not a pref. well cogn diss says aftr y choose a door y like it *bcs* y chose it.
-cognitive dissonance theory suggests that people would have a better opinion of the good they choose after choosing it than before.
-mere act choosing btw two goods (A over B) makes people like A more & B less.

#(GIF Image, 190x574 pixels) “I don’t know th there’s clean that's what he said: clean, not 'clear' evidence th merely being asked to choose btw two objects will make you devalue the one you didn’t choose.”
Psycholog expl: monkey rationalizes initial rejectn of blue by deciding d n like blue.
Statistical expl: if monkey slightly prefers red over blue, there are only 3 poss rankings of green in 2 of wh will prefer green over blue /anyway

#dlcs notes on Cognitive Dissonance - The Monty Hall Problem
the Monty Hall prob may discredit cogn diss theory /?don't think that's right. cogn diss discredited not by MHprob but by analysis of any choice among 3 options [as per GIF: showing that if prefer A to B, there is a 2 in 3 chance prefer C to B also]

cathy: other door dead to me. ok I understand that. like my choices over-determined. so, after reject something I probably tend to affirm my rejection of it.
cathy: convince myself averse to it bcs I could not choose it.


ok so statistical explanation, regarding the monkeys choosing m&ms by colors, points out that monkey probably liked the color he rejected less than the other two to begin with. so that discredits the cogn dissonance theory that he declared it dead to him *bcs* rejected it when forced to choose.


M. Keith Chen:Working Papers and Recent Publications
Rationalization and Cognitive Dissonance: Do Choices Affect or Reflect Preferences? pdf draft Jan08
Abstract:
Cognitive dissonance is one of the most influential theories in social psychology, and its oldest experiential realization is choice-induced dissonance. Since 1956, dissonance theorists have claimed that people rationalize past choices by devaluing rejected alternatives and upgrading chosen ones, an effect known as the spreading of preferences. Here, I show that every study which has tested this suffers from a fundamental methodological flaw. Specifically, these studies (and the free-choice methodology they employ) implicitly assume that before choices are made, a subject's preferences can be measured perfectly, i.e. with infinite precision, and under-appreciate that a subject's choices reflect their preferences. Because of this, existing methods will mistakenly identify cognitive dissonance when there is none.

ok. but with regards to Monty Hall Problem, this would say what? it's not that people are attached to first choice (which they ought to forsake, according to the statistical odds of choosing the correct door), it's that they probably preferred that door to begin with?
the relevance of Monty Hall here is loose, I think.
it may even just confuse things to have brought it up in the article.
does Chen actually talk about the Monty Hall Problem in his working paper?
well he does once, and in blog post... read that to see if sth not yet understood.

Therefore, any paper which tests cognitive dissonance by testing that C is chosen more than B will spuriously find cognitive dissonance. Indeed, the belief that C and B should be equally chosen in the third round methodological flaw: not appreciating the 2 in 3 chance that monkey already liked C better than B to begin with is mathematically equivalent ok to a well-known logical fallacy, popularly known in economics as the three-door (or Monty-Hall) problem (for an excellent summary of the problem, see Nalebuff 1987).
? equiv in that.. ?we think that after Monty rules out one door for us, we have a fifty-fifty chance that either door is hiding the car ~ failing to appreciate that our information has changed
-the door we chose was given as one in three behind 1 of wh *was* a car.
-whereas th other door is now known to be one of two behind 1 of wh *is* a car.
yes but that is true of the door we chose, now, too. but it was not before. clearer with more than three---
maybe worth noting that we know about the other door that it *was* one of three and now *is* one of two - we know two coinciding things about it, whereas we only know the first thing about the door we chose, that it was one of the three.
hmm, yes that might really get to it, for me. with the cards, we chose one that was one of 52 cards in which there was an AceofHearts. we are now choosing btw that card, about which we know nothing new, and a card that is both also one of the 52 and that we have learned is one of 2 cards among wh there is that Ace. well but again ~ we know that about our card too now. ~

...anyway not sure I see what is equivalent. not appreciating that monkey (probably) already liked C better than B = Monty Hall Problem (what aspect?!?)

look at what Chen says for the blog post...
These studies have claimed that the mere act of choosing between two goods (say, choosing A over B) makes people like A more and B less — that is, people’s preferences between A and B “spread”. To be more specific, the free-choice paradigm that looks at this “spreading of alternatives” is one of the primary methodologies for examining cognitive dissonance and is considered one of the most established results in social psychology. And, I claim, every study which has shown “spreading” essentially makes a Monty-Hall-like error, by neglecting the fact that people’s choices aren’t random; that in fact their choices teach you something. Monty’s choice teaches you a lot about where the car is hmm, and similarly, people’s choices teach you a lot about which good they like. This is central to how economists think about people’s choices, and a fact that these psychology studies subtly ignore.
..Specifically, when we drop subjects who choose good B over good A, we may be systematically dropping subjects who like good B (more than good A). Ignoring this possibility is like ignoring Monty’s choice and what it tells us about where the car is likely to be. By throwing out subjects, a study “stacks the deck” of remaining subjects with people who like good A more than they like good B. ..I show that all of these results might be explained by the simple “selection” story that I tell here; that is all of these studies fail to fully take in to account that people tend to choose goods which they like.
..I have begun to conduct several experiments which are designed to separately measure the “cognitive dissonance” effect, and the Monty-Hall-like “selection” effect I explain above.