The Mathematics of Behavior

Mathematical thinking provides a clear, crisp way of defining problems. Our whole technology is based on it. What is less appreciated is that mathematical thinking can also be applied to problems in the social and behavioral sciences. This book illustrates how mathematics can be used to understand human and animal behavior, using examples in psychology, sociology, economics, ecology, and even marriage counseling.

This book is about using mathematics to think about how humans (and other animals) behave.

Earl Hunt is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He has written many articles and chapters in contributed volumes and was the past editor of Cognitive Psychology and Journal of Experimental Psychology. His books include Concept Learning: An Information Processing Problem (Wiley), Experiments in Induction (Academic Press), Artificial Intelligence (Academic Press), and Will We Be Smart Enough? (Sage Foundation) which won the William James Prize from the American Psychological Association in
1996. His most recent book is Thoughts on Thought (Erlbaum, 2002).