We document two new facts about the distributions of answers in famous statistical problems: they are i) multi-modal and ii) unstable with respect to irrelevant changes in the problem. We offer a model in which, when solving a problem, people represent each hypothesis by attending "bottom up" to...

Social sciences start by looking at the social-psychological attributes of humans to model and explain their observed behavior. However, we suggest starting the study of observed human behavior with the universal laws of physics, e.g., the principle of minimum action. In our proposed three-tier...

The default model of economic choice--used in economics instruction and in the bulk of scholarship in microeconomics--assumes that decision makers are selfish. As shown by behavioral scientists, this assumption is consistent with chimpanzee behavior, but inconsistent with human behavior. Unlike...