Understanding the human mind and behavior lies at the core of the discipline of psychology. But to characterize how people’s behavior changes over time, I believe psychology alone is insufficient — and that additional mathematical idea needs to be brought forward.
My new model, published in Frontiers in Psychology, is inspired by the work of the 19th-century American mathematician Norbert Wiener. At its heart is how we change our perceptions over time when tasked with making a choice from a set of alternatives. Such changes are often generated by limited information, which we analyze before making decisions that determine our behavioral patterns.
Math v. information
To understand these patterns, we need the mathematics of information processing. Here, the state of a person’s mind is represented by the likelihood it assigns to different alternatives — which product to buy, which school to send your child to, which candidate to vote for in an election, and so on.
