Conditioning (probability)

Probability is like guessing the likely outcome of something. Conditioning is a way of adding information to help us make better guesses. Imagine you have a jar full of' tokens. Some tokens are red, some are blue, some are green and some are yellow. You close your eyes and pick out a token. You don't know if it's red, blue, green or yellow, but you know it has to be one of those colors.

Now, imagine you open your eyes and you can see it's a red token. You can now be more confident that the next time you pick a token out it will also be red. This is called conditioning. By seeing the first token was red, you've added information (or "conditioned your guess") to make a better guess about the color of the next token you pick. This is what probability conditioning does. It adds information to help us better guess the likely outcome of something.