Psychology
Psychological interest in Simpson's paradox seeks to explain why people deem sign reversal to be impossible at first, offended by the idea that a treatment could benefit both males and females and harm the population as a whole. The question is where people get this strong intuition from, and how it is encoded in the mind. Simpson's paradox demonstrates that this intuition cannot be supported by probability calculus alone, and thus led philosophers to speculate that it is supported by an innate causal logic that guides people in reasoning about actions and their consequences. Savage's "sure thing principle" is an example of what such logic may entail. A qualified version of Savage's sure thing principle can indeed be derived from Pearl's do-calculus and reads: "An action A that increases the probability of an event B in each subpopulation Ci of C must also increase the probability of B in the population as a whole, provided that the action does not change the distribution of the subpopulations." This suggests that knowledge about actions and consequences is stored in a form resembling Causal Bayesian Networks.
Read more about this topic: Simpson's Paradox
Famous quotes containing the word psychology:
“Psychology has nothing to say about what women are really like, what they need and what they want, essentially because psychology does not know.... this failure is not limited to women; rather, the kind of psychology that has addressed itself to how people act and who they are has failed to understand in the first place why people act the way they do, and certainly failed to understand what might make them act differently.”
—Naomi Weisstein, U.S. psychologist, feminist, and author. Psychology Constructs the Female (1969)
“Views of women, on one side, as inwardly directed toward home and family and notions of men, on the other, as outwardly striving toward fame and fortune have resounded throughout literature and in the texts of history, biology, and psychology until they seem uncontestable. Such dichotomous views defy the complexities of individuals and stifle the potential for people to reveal different dimensions of themselves in various settings.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)
“Fundamentally the male artist approximates more to the psychology of woman, who, biologically speaking, is a purely creative being and whose personality has been as mysterious and unfathomable to the man as the artist has been to the average person.”
—Beatrice Hinkle (1874–1953)