When uncertainty meets life: The effect of animacy on probability expression
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2013, Vol 8, Issue 4
Abstract
Everyone faces uncertainty on a daily basis. Two kinds of probability expressions, verbal and numerical, have been used to characterize the uncertainty that we face. Because our cognitive concept of living things differs from that of non-living things, and distinguishing cognitive concepts might have linguistic markers, we designed four studies to test whether people use different probability expressions when faced with animate or inanimate uncertainty. We found that verbal probability is the preferred way to express animate uncertainty, whereas numerical probability is the preferred way to express inanimate uncertainty. The “verbal-animate” and “numerical-inanimate” associations were robust enough to persist when tested with forced-choice response patterns regardless of the information (e.g., equally likely outcomes, frequencies, or personal beliefs) used to construct probabilities of events. When the response pattern was changed to free-responses, the associations were evident unless the subjects were asked to write their own probability predictions for vague uncertainty. Given that the world around us consists of both animate (i.e., living) and inanimate (i.e., non-living) things, “verbal-animate” and “numerical-inanimate” associations may play a major role in risk communication and may otherwise be useful for practitioners and consultants.
Authors and Affiliations
Xue-Lei Du, Shi-Hong Liu, Jie-Hong Xu, Li-Lin Rao, Cheng-Ming Jiang and Shu Li
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678080
- DOI -
- Views 105
- Downloads 0
Can asymmetric subjective opportunity cost effect explain impatience in intertemporal choice? A replication study
In “The value of nothing: asymmetric attention to opportunity costs drives intertemporal decision making” Read, Olivola and Hardisty (2017) proposed an asymmetric subjective opportunity cost (ASOC) effect to explain and...
Coming close to the ideal alternative: The concordant-ranks strategy
We present the Concordant-Ranks (CR) strategy that decision makers use to quickly find an alternative that is proximate to an ideal alternative in a multi-attribute decision space. CR implies that decision makers prefer...
How to measure time preferences: An experimental comparison of three methods
In two studies, time preferences for financial gains and losses at delays of up to 50 years were elicited using three different methods: matching, fixed-sequence choice titration, and a dynamic “staircase” choice method....
Weighing waiting: The influence of information certainty and delay penalty on waiting for noninstrumental information
People have been shown to delay decision making to wait for missing noninstrumental attribute information — information that would not have altered their decision if known at the outset — with this delay originally attri...
Robust consistency of choice switching in decisions from experience
Decision making is a multifaceted process but studies of individual differences in decision behavior typically use only the proportions of choices from different options as behavioral indices. I examine whether the proba...