Quantum theory reveals puzzling pattern in how people respond to some surveys

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 Researchers used quantum theory – usually invoked to describe the actions of subatomic particles – to identify an unexpected and strange pattern in how people respond to survey questions. By conventional standards, the results are surprising: The scientists found the exact same pattern in 70 nationally representative surveys from Gallup and the Pew Research center taken from 2001 to 2011, as well as in two laboratory experiments. Most of the national surveys included more than 1,000 respondents in the United States. “Human behavior is very sensitive to context. It may be as context sensitive as the actions of some of the particles that quantum physicists study,” said Zheng Wang, lead author of the study and associate professor of communication at The Ohio State University. “By using quantum theory, we were able to predict a surprising regularity in human behavior with unusual accuracy for the social sciences in a large set of different surveys.” The study appears online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Wang conducted the study with Tyler Solloway of Ohio State, and Richard Shiffrin and Jerome Busemeyer of Indiana University. These new findings involved an issue that has long faced researchers using survey data or any

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