Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present the results of two temporally extendedexperimental implementations of the Monty Hall dilemma inorder to examine the dynamics of belief. In the firstexperiment, we used the standard three-door version of thedilemma, but biased the probability of the winning doorpositionally. Participants capitalized on the increasedprobabilities but did not discover the optimal switch strategy.In the second experiment, we increased the number of doors,in each case removing all but two doors. As the number ofdoors increased, participants converged on the optimal switchstrategy, as well as increasing their confidence in theirstrategy. This suggests that the information relevant to theMHD is not win frequencies but how the different elements ofthe dilemma are related.