You know who does really well on the Monty Hall problem? Pigeons. At least, pigeons quickly learn to switch doors when the game is repeated multiple times over 30 days and they can observe that switching doors is twice as likely to yield the prize.
This isn't some bias in favor of switching either, because when the condition is reversed so the prize is made to be twice as likely to appear behind the door that was originally chosen, the pigeons update against switching just as quickly.
Remarkably, humans don't update at all on the iterated game. When switching is better, a third of people refuse to switch no matter how long the game is repeated.
And when switching is worse, a third of humans keep switching.
I first saw this chart when my wife was giving a talk on pigeon cognition (I really married well). I immediately became curious about the exact sort of human who can yield a chart like that. The study these are taken from is titled Are Birds Smarter than Mathematicians?, but the respondents were not mathematicians at all.
Failing to improve one iota in the repeated game requires a particular sort of dysrationalia, where you’re so certain of your mathematical intuition that mounting evidence to the contrary only causes you to double down on your wrongness. Other studies have shown that people who don’t know math at all, like little kids, quickly update towards switching. The reluctance to switch can only come from an extreme Dunning-Kruger effect. These are people whose inability to do math is matched only by their certainty in their own mathematical skill.
- Monty Hall in the Wild
This isn't some bias in favor of switching either, because when the condition is reversed so the prize is made to be twice as likely to appear behind the door that was originally chosen, the pigeons update against switching just as quickly.
Remarkably, humans don't update at all on the iterated game. When switching is better, a third of people refuse to switch no matter how long the game is repeated.
And when switching is worse, a third of humans keep switching.
I first saw this chart when my wife was giving a talk on pigeon cognition (I really married well). I immediately became curious about the exact sort of human who can yield a chart like that. The study these are taken from is titled Are Birds Smarter than Mathematicians?, but the respondents were not mathematicians at all.
Failing to improve one iota in the repeated game requires a particular sort of dysrationalia, where you’re so certain of your mathematical intuition that mounting evidence to the contrary only causes you to double down on your wrongness. Other studies have shown that people who don’t know math at all, like little kids, quickly update towards switching. The reluctance to switch can only come from an extreme Dunning-Kruger effect. These are people whose inability to do math is matched only by their certainty in their own mathematical skill.
- Monty Hall in the Wild
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