dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaQuantum noise influencing human behaviour could fake effectiveness of drugs in clinical trials
| Authors | Dominik Janzing, Thomas Beth |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | quant-ph/0208006 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0208006 |
Abstract
To test the effectiveness of a drug one can advice two randomly selected groups of patients to take or not to take it, respectively. It is well-known that the causal effect cannot be identified if not all patients comply. This holds even when the non-compliers can be identified afterwards since latent factors like patient's personality can influence both his decision and his physical response. However, one can still give bounds on the effectiveness of the drug depending on the rate of compliance. Remarkably, the proofs of these bounds given in the literature rely on models that represent all relevant latent factors (including noise) by hidden classical variables. In strong analogy to the violation of Bell's inequality, some of these bounds fail if patient's behavior is influenced by latent quantum processes (e.g. in his nervous system). Quantum effects could fake an increase of the recovery rate by about 13% although the drug would hurt as many patients as it would help if everyone took it. The other bounds are true even in the quantum case. We do not present any realistic model showing this effect, we only point out that the physics of decision making could be relevant for the causal interpretation of every-day life statistical data.
{
"annotation_id": "ca97e094-d800-46fb-8e6d-5cb7db747d35",
"date_created": "2026-03-02T18:01:53.095000Z",
"date_modified": "2026-03-02T18:01:53.095000Z",
"file_hash": "ae2e7908e58119708a79d400eb5e8801888172321e6b131a662a41fe96262f4b",
"private": false,
"record": {
"abstract": "To test the effectiveness of a drug one can advice two randomly selected\ngroups of patients to take or not to take it, respectively. It is well-known\nthat the causal effect cannot be identified if not all patients comply. This\nholds even when the non-compliers can be identified afterwards since latent\nfactors like patient\u0027s personality can influence both his decision and his\nphysical response. However, one can still give bounds on the effectiveness of\nthe drug depending on the rate of compliance. Remarkably, the proofs of these\nbounds given in the literature rely on models that represent all relevant\nlatent factors (including noise) by hidden classical variables. In strong\nanalogy to the violation of Bell\u0027s inequality, some of these bounds fail if\npatient\u0027s behavior is influenced by latent quantum processes (e.g. in his\nnervous system). Quantum effects could fake an increase of the recovery rate by\nabout 13% although the drug would hurt as many patients as it would help if\neveryone took it. The other bounds are true even in the quantum case.\n We do not present any realistic model showing this effect, we only point out\nthat the physics of decision making could be relevant for the causal\ninterpretation of every-day life statistical data.",
"arxiv_id": "quant-ph/0208006",
"authors": [
"Dominik Janzing",
"Thomas Beth"
],
"categories": [
"quant-ph"
],
"title": "Quantum noise influencing human behaviour could fake effectiveness of drugs in clinical trials",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0208006"
},
"schema_id": "dorsal/arxiv",
"source": {
"execution_id": "461f75a0-a912-4b98-a77e-0a3caba3b657",
"id": "arXiv Dataset IDs",
"type": "Model",
"variant": "snapshot-2026-03-01",
"version": "0.1.0"
},
"user_id": 1000002
}