Probability – The Monty Hall Problem: Understanding Where Intuition Fails

intuitionprobabilitypuzzle

From Wikipedia :

Suppose you're on a game show, and
you're given the choice of three
doors: Behind one door is a car;
behind the others, goats. You pick a
door, say No. 1, and the host, who
knows what's behind the doors, opens
another door, say No. 3, which has a
goat. He then says to you, "Do you
want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to
your advantage to switch your choice?

The answer is, of course, yes – but it's incredibly un-inituitive. What misunderstanding do most people have about probability that leads to us scratching our heads — or better put; what general rule can we take away from this puzzle to better train our intuition in the future?

Best Answer

Consider two simple variations of the problem:

  1. No doors are opened for the contestant. The host offers no help in picking a door. In this case it is obvious that the odds of picking the correct door are 1/3.
  2. Before the contestant is asked to venture a guess, the host opens a door and reveals a goat. After the host reveals a goat, the contestant has to pick the car from the two remaining doors. In this case it is obvious that the odds of picking the correct door is 1/2.

For a contestant to know the probability of his door choice being correct, he has to know how many positive outcomes are available to him and divide that number by the amount of possible outcomes. Because of the two simple cases outlined above, it is very natural to think of all the possible outcomes available as the number of doors to choose from, and the amount of positive outcomes as the number of doors that conceal a car. Given this intuitive assumption, even if the host opens a door to reveal a goat after the contestant makes a guess, the probability of either door containing a car remains 1/2.

In reality, probability recognizes a set of possible outcomes larger than the three doors and it recognizes a set of positive outcomes that is larger than the singular door with the car. In the correct analysis of the problem, the host provides the contestant with new information making a new question to be addressed: what is the probability that my original guess is such that the new information provided by the host is sufficient to inform me of the correct door? In answering this question, the set of positive outcomes and the set of possible outcomes are not tangible doors and cars but rather abstract arrangements of the goats and car. The three possible outcomes are the three possible arrangements of two goats and one car behind three doors. The two positive outcomes are the two possible arrangements where the first guess of the contestant is false. In each of these two arrangements, the information given by the host (one of the two remaining doors is empty) is sufficient for the contestant to determine the door that conceals the car.

In summation:

We have a tendency to look for a simple mapping between physical manifestations of our choices (the doors and the cars) and the number of possible outcomes and desired outcomes in a question of probability. This works fine in cases where no new information is provided to the contestant. However, if the contestant is provided with more information (ie one of the doors you didn't choose is certainly not a car), this mapping breaks down and the correct question to be asked is found to be more abstract.

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