Center for Brain and Cognition, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 25-27 Ramon Trias Fargas St, Barcelona, 08005, Spain.
Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, Brown University, 190 Thayer St, Providence, RI, 02912, USA.
Nat Commun. 2018 Jun 12;9(1):2156. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-04631-9.
Uncertainty is a fundamental feature of human life that can be fractioned into two distinct psychological constructs: risk (known probabilistic outcomes) and ambiguity (unknown probabilistic outcomes). Although risk and ambiguity are known to powerfully bias nonsocial decision-making, their influence on prosocial behavior remains largely unexplored. Here we show that ambiguity attitudes, but not risk attitudes, predict prosocial behavior: the greater an individual's ambiguity tolerance, the more they engage in costly prosocial behaviors, both during decisions to cooperate (experiments 1 and 3) and choices to trust (experiment 2). Once the ambiguity associated with another's actions is sufficiently resolved, this relationship between ambiguity tolerance and prosocial choice is eliminated (experiment 3). Taken together, these results provide converging evidence that attitudes toward ambiguity are a robust predictor of one's willingness to engage in costly social behavior, which suggests a mechanism for the underlying motivations of prosocial action.
不确定性是人类生活的一个基本特征，可以分为两个不同的心理结构：风险（已知的概率结果）和模糊性（未知的概率结果）。虽然风险和模糊性已知会强烈影响非社会性决策，但它们对亲社会行为的影响在很大程度上仍未得到探索。在这里，我们表明，模糊性态度，而不是风险态度，预测亲社会行为：个体的模糊性容忍度越高，他们就越会在合作决策（实验 1 和 3）和信任选择（实验 2）中进行代价高昂的亲社会行为。一旦与他人行为相关的模糊性得到充分解决，模糊性容忍度与亲社会选择之间的这种关系就会消除（实验 3）。总之，这些结果提供了一致的证据，表明对模糊性的态度是一个人愿意进行代价高昂的社会行为的一个强有力的预测指标，这表明了亲社会行为的潜在动机的一种机制。
