title: Context effects produced by question orders reveal quantum nature of human judgments.
abstract: The hypothesis that human reasoning obeys the laws of quantum rather than classical probability has been used in recent years to explain a variety of seemingly "irrational" judgment and decision-making findings. This article provides independent evidence for this hypothesis based on an a priori prediction, called the quantum question (QQ) equality, concerning the effect of asking attitude questions successively in different orders. We empirically evaluated the predicted QQ equality using 70 national representative surveys and two laboratory experiments that manipulated question orders. Each national study contained 651-3,006 participants. The results provided strong support for the predicted QQ equality. These findings suggest that quantum probability theory, initially invented to explain noncommutativity of measurements in physics, provides a simple account for a surprising regularity regarding measurement order effects in social and behavioral science.
authors: School of Communication, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210; and shiffrin@indiana.edu wang.1243@osu.edu.
authors: Zheng
authors: Z
authors: Wang
authors: School of Communication, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210; and.
authors: Tyler
authors: T
authors: Solloway
authors: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 shiffrin@indiana.edu wang.1243@osu.edu.
authors: Richard M
authors: RM
authors: Shiffrin
authors: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405.
authors: Jerome R
authors: JR
authors: Busemeyer
mesh_terms: D001290:Attitude; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology*; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011338:Probability Theory; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires
keywords: attitude judgment; measurement effects; national surveys; quantum theory