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The phenomenon of ambiguity aversion suggests that people prefer options that offer precisely rather than imprecisely known chances of success. However, past work on people's responses to ambiguity in health treatment contexts found ambiguity seeking rather than aversion. The present work addressed whether such findings reflected a broad tendency for ambiguity seeking in health treatment contexts or whether specific attributions for ambiguity play a substantial role. In three studies, people choose between two treatment options that involved similar underlying probabilities, except that the probabilities for one option involved ambiguity. The attributions offered for the ambiguity played an important role in the results. For example, when the range of probabilities associated with an ambiguous treatment was attributed to the fact that different studies yield different results, participants tended to show ambiguity aversion or indifference. However, when the range was attributed to something that participants could control (e.g., regular application of a cream) or something about which they were overoptimistic (e.g., their immune system function), participants tended to show ambiguity seeking. Health professionals should be mindful of how people will interpret and use information about ambiguity when choosing among treatments.

 

When making decisions involving risk, people may learn about the risk from descriptions or from experience. The description-experience gap refers to the difference in decision patterns driven by this discrepancy in learning format. Across two experiments, we investigated whether learning from description versus experience differentially affects the direction and the magnitude of a context effect in risky decision making. In Study 1 and 2, a computerized game called the Decisions about Risk Task (DART) was used to measure people’s risk-taking tendencies toward hazard stimuli that exploded probabilistically. The rate at which a context hazard caused harm was manipulated, while the rate at which a focal hazard caused harm was held constant. The format by which this information was learned was also manipulated; it was learned primarily by experience or by description. The results revealed that participants’ behavior toward the focal hazard varied depending on what they had learned about the context hazard. Specifically, there were contrast effects in which participants were more likely to choose a risky behavior toward the focal hazard when the harm rate posed by the context hazard was high rather than low. Critically, these contrast effects were of similar strength irrespective of whether the risk information was learned from experience or description. Participants’ verbal assessments of risk likelihood also showed contrast effects, irrespective of learning format. Although risk information about a context hazard in DART does nothing to affect the objective expected value of risky versus safe behaviors toward focal hazards, it did affect participants’ perceptions and behaviors—regardless of whether the information was learned from description or experience. Our findings suggest that context has a broad-based role in how people assess and make decisions about hazards. 

Past work has suggested that people prescribe optimism—believing it is better to be optimistic, instead of accurate or pessimistic, about uncertain future events. Here, we identified and addressed an important ambiguity about whether those findings reflect an endorsement of biased beliefs—i.e., whether people prescribe likelihood estimates that reflect overoptimism. In three studies, participants (total N = 663 U.S. university students) read scenarios about protagonists facing uncertain events with a desired outcome. Results replicated prescriptions of optimism when using the same solicitations as in past work. However, we found quite different prescriptions when using alternative solicitations that asked about potential bias in likelihood estimations and that did not involve vague terms like “optimistic.” Participants generally prescribed being optimistic, feeling optimistic, and even thinking optimistically about the events, but they did not prescribe overestimating the likelihood of those events. 

People often use tools for tasks, and sometimes there is uncertainty about whether a given task can be completed with a given tool. This project explored whether, when, and how people’s optimism about successfully completing a task with a given tool is affected by the contextual salience of a better or worse tool. In six studies, participants were faced with novel tasks. For each task, they were assigned a tool but also exposed to a comparison tool that was better or worse in utility (or sometimes similar in utility). In some studies, the tool comparisons were essentially social comparisons, because the tool was assigned to another person. In other studies, the tool comparisons were merely counterfactual rather than social. The studies revealed contrast effects on optimism, and the effect worked in both directions. That is, worse comparison tools boosted optimism and better tools depressed optimism. The contrast effects were observed regardless of the general type of comparison (e.g., social, counterfactual). The comparisons also influenced discrete decisions about which task to attempt (for a prize), which is an important finding for ruling out superficial scaling explanations for the contrast effects. It appears that people fail to exclude irrelevant tool-comparison information from consideration when assessing their likelihood of success on a task, resulting in biased optimism and decisions.