Uncertainty and conflict: A point of contact between information-theory and behavior-theory concepts.

Abstract

Information theory, originally designed to handle certain problems in communications engineering (41), needs to be distinguished from psychological information theory, which is one of its offshoots. The former consists of a mathematical language, incorporating a number of distinctive measuring techniques. Psychological information theory is, in contrast, a type of theory in the scientific sense: it applies information-theory measures to phenomena within the purview of psychology and uses information-theory language to formulate laws or hypotheses with testable implications about behavior. Recent literature contains several sketches of such theory (e.g., 1, 26, 35), mostly concerned with how human beings code information or with how much information can pass through them in particular situations. There are many unmistakable affinities between this kind of psychological theory and S-R behavior theory (learning theory): they have overlapping interests in