Symptom-Based Contextual Models of Cognition and Judgment for Resolving Biased Decision Making Under Uncertainty

This article presents a contextual entropic model for understanding, explaining, and resolving cognitive biases associated with thinking under uncertainty. This article applies a unique performance evaluation of teamwork method, enabling a qualitative and quantitative assessment of symptom-based context and ensuring a clear and rational interpretation of decision making in ambiguous and risky situations. This human reliability assessment method also contributes to a deeper understanding of the iterative and complementary nature of cognition and decision making. The main idea is the quantum-like understanding of the dual image of a symptom as a wave and a bit of information in thought processes. Thus, each context alternative is identified by a unique combination of three-valued states of the socio-technical system at discrete points in time—recognized, unrecognized, and unrecognizable. Judgment is a wave-like process driven by the interfering sum of the amplitudes of symptom recognition shifts. By modeling stepwise cognitive processes by adding and subtracting symptoms or stimuli, we can estimate and compare the likelihood ratios between biased judgments. This article presents three canonical filters used to improve cognitive theories and decision-making methods—Ellsberg’s two-color, three-color, and four-color paradoxes—to demonstrate the power of the symptom-based context model.