A little bit of How An Algorithm Feels From Inside:
Why is the Monty Hall problem so horribly unintuitive? Why does it feel like there's an equal probability to pick the correct door (1/2+1/2) when actually there's not (1/3+2/3)?
Here are the relevant bits from the Wikipedia article:
Out of 228 subjects in one study, only 13% chose to switch (Granberg and Brown, 1995:713). In her book The Power of Logical Thinking, vos Savant (1996, p. 15) quotes cognitive psychologist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini as saying "... no other statistical puzzle comes so close to fooling all the people all the time" and "that even Nobel physicists systematically give the wrong answer, and that they insist on it, and they are ready to berate in print those who propose the right answer." Interestingly, pigeons make mistakes and learn from mistakes, and experiments show that they rapidly learn to always switch, unlike humans (Herbranson and Schroeder, 2010).
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Although these issues are mathematically significant, even when controlling for these factors nearly all people still think each of the two unopened doors has an equal probability and conclude switching does not matter (Mueser and Granberg, 1999). This "equal probability" assumption is a deeply rooted intuition (Falk 1992:202). People strongly tend to think probability is evenly distributed across as many unknowns as are present, whether it is or not (Fox and Levav, 2004:637). Indeed, if a player believes that sticking and switching are equally successful and therefore equally often decides to switch as to stay, they will win 50% of the time, reinforcing their original belief. Missing the unequal chances of those two doors, and in not considering that (1/3+2/3) / 2 gives a chance of 50%, similar to "the little green woman" example (Marc C. Steinbach, 2000).
The problem continues to attract the attention of cognitive psychologists. The typical behaviour of the majority, i.e., not switching, may be explained by phenomena known in the psychological literature as: 1) the endowment effect (Kahneman et al., 1991); people tend to overvalue the winning probability of the already chosen – already "owned" – door; 2) the status quo bias (Samuelson and Zeckhauser, 1988); people prefer to stick with the choice of door they have already made. Experimental evidence confirms that these are plausible explanations which do not depend on probability intuition (Morone and Fiore, 2007).
Those bias listed in the last paragraph maybe explain why people choose not to switch the door, but what explains the "equal probability" intuition? Do you have any insight on this?
I think the monty hall problem very closely resembles a more natural one in which the probability is 1/2; namely, that where the host is your opponent and chose whether to offer you the chance to switch. So evolutionarily-optimized instincts tell us the probability is 1/2.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.