Anxiety and the Framing Effect
The risky choice framing effect is a classic finding in the decision making literature in which people are known to be risk averse for problems described in terms of gains, but risk seeking for equivalent problems that are described in terms of losses. Results from neuroscience have linked brain regions associated with anxiety to brain regions that activate when frame consistent decisions are made. In a behavioral study involving a certainty equivalence estimation task, we found that intolerance of uncertainty, a construct associated with trait anxiety, indeed predicted susceptibility to framing effects. However, in a follow-up study that did not involve certainty equivalence estimation, no such effect was found. One possible explanation is that certainty equivalence estimation involves implicit feedback, which the follow-up task did not. We are currently exploring alterantive designs involving different types of direct and implicit feedback, to test if feedback does indeed mediate the relationship between anxiety and susceptibility to the framing effect.
Do People Recognize Epistemic and Aleatory Uncertainty?
Uncertainty is sometimes divided into two different types: epistemic uncertainty, or uncertainty stemming from a lack of knowledge about a subject; and aleatory uncertainty, or uncertainty that stems from inherent randomness in the world. Evidence suggests that perceived “epistemicness” may be a driver of overconfidence in probability judgment. However, it remains a challenge to evaluate how and how well individuals evaluate their own subjective uncertainty. Do people have a sense of the extent to which epistemic uncertainty can be reduced, while aleatory uncertainty cannot? Does this awareness vary across people? If so, it could have dramatic implications across many topics of interest not only to the SUB lab, but to our understanding of both metacognition and judgment undercertainty.