"You're not irrational, you're just quantum probabilistic: Researchers explain human decision-making with physics theory"

"According to Zheng Joyce Wang and others who try to model our decision-making processes mathematically, the equations and axioms that most closely match human behavior may be ones that are rooted in quantum physics.

"We have accumulated so many paradoxical findings in the field of cognition, and especially in decision-making," said Wang, who is an associate professor of communication and director of the Communication and Psychophysiology Lab at The Ohio State University.

"Whenever something comes up that isn't consistent with classical theories, we often label it as 'irrational.' But from the perspective of quantum cognition, some findings aren't irrational anymore. They're consistent with quantum theory—and with how people really behave."...

"In the social and behavioral sciences as a whole, we use probability models a lot," she said. "For example, we ask, what is the probability that a person will act a certain way or make a certain decision? Traditionally, those models are all based on classical probability theory—which arose from the classical physics of Newtonian systems. So it's really not so exotic for social scientists to think about quantum systems and their mathematical principles, too."...

Quantum cognition is what happens when humans have to deal with ambiguity mentally. Sometimes we aren't certain about how we feel, or we feel ambiguous about which option to choose, or we have to make decisions based on limited information."

http://phys.org/news/2015-09-youre-irrational-quantum-probabilistic-human.html

This is fascinating and I kind of love it. It feels so much more real about the world, moving away from falsely deterministic models. Because, really, every psych study is about probabilities - X group is 20% more likely to have Y behavior under Z condition. It's rarely absolutely deterministic. 

I wonder if we didn't start explaining things with that set of math in the20th century because we'd just developed it and were suddenly finding all these things we could explain with it, so there was a zeitgeist of explaining things with that math. And now we're moving into another level of math, and I feel like it's letting the world feel a little less chaotic.