Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent research has identified three invariants or identities thatappear to hold in people’s probabilistic decision making: theaddition law identity, the Bayes rule identity, and the QQidentity (Costello and Watts, 2014, Fisher and Wolfe, 2014,Costello and Watts, 2016b, Wang and Busemeyer, 2013, Wanget al., 2014). Each of these identities represent specific agree-ment with the requirements of normative probability theory;strikingly, these identities seem to hold in people’s probabilityjudgments despite the presence of strong and systematic bi-ases against the requirements of normative probability theoryin those very same judgments. We assess the degree to whichtwo formal models of probabilistic reasoning (the ‘probabilitytheory plus noise’ model and the ‘quantum probability’ model)can explain these identities and biases in probabilistic reason-ing.