05.03.10
Pigeons might do better than humans at game shows, at least on "Let's Make A Deal."
These new findings — involving the pigeons superior ability to solve a perplexing statistical problem — might in turn shed light on why humans are bad at solving certain kinds of problems, scientists added.
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One possible reason people are worse than pigeons at the Monty Hall problem might be due to how people learn.
Past research with university students found they almost universally believed that staying and switching were equally likely to win, while younger students believed this less. Only in the youngest group tested — a bunch of 8th graders — did a significant although small fraction of students figure out switching was the best strategy. It may be that education leads people to acquire ways of thinking that, while efficient, can interfere with certain kinds of performance.
"During 'education,' which I would take to encompass not just formal education, but also one's general life experience, we acquire heuristics — rules of thumb that, either consciously or unconsciously, allow us to respond to a complex world quickly," said researcher Walter Herbranson, a comparative psychologist at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. "But while these heuristics are fast and generally accurate, they're not correct 100 percent of the time."
The scientists propose the curious difference between pigeon and human behavior might be rooted in the difference between classical and empirical probability. In classical probability, one tries to figure out every possible outcome and make predictions without collecting data. In empirical probability, one makes predictions after tracking outcomes over time.
Pigeons likely use empirical probability to solve the Monty Hall problem and appear to do so quite successfully.
"Different species often find very different solutions to the same problems," Herbranson said. "We humans have ways of tackling probability-based problems that generally work pretty well for us, the Monty Hall dilemma being one notable exception. Pigeons apparently have a different approach, one that just happens to be better suited to the Monty Hall dilemma."
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