Belief and Surprise - A Belief-Function Formulation
This work addresses a foundational problem in modeling human cognition and decision-making, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing belief-function formulations without clear empirical validation.
The paper tackles the problem of formalizing human belief by proposing a theory where belief is binary (entertained or not) and associated with a degree of confidence, leading to surprise proportional to that confidence when the belief is contradicted.
We motivate and describe a theory of belief in this paper. This theory is developed with the following view of human belief in mind. Consider the belief that an event E will occur (or has occurred or is occurring). An agent either entertains this belief or does not entertain this belief (i.e., there is no "grade" in entertaining the belief). If the agent chooses to exercise "the will to believe" and entertain this belief, he/she/it is entitled to a degree of confidence c (1 > c > 0) in doing so. Adopting this view of human belief, we conjecture that whenever an agent entertains the belief that E will occur with c degree of confidence, the agent will be surprised (to the extent c) upon realizing that E did not occur.