Institute of Tax Law and Economics, Department of Economics, Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands; Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Institute for Management Research, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Neuroimage. 2022 May 1;251:119007. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.119007. Epub 2022 Feb 16.
Studies on decision-making under uncertainty have mainly focused on understanding preferences for either risk or ambiguity using standard lottery designs. However, people often face uncertainty that directly stems from interacting with other people, which may be processed differently from lottery-based uncertainty. Here, we substantially extend the investigation of uncertainty by examining a fourfold pattern of the sources and the types of uncertainty, assessing behavioral and neural responses to both risk and ambiguity across both social and non-social contexts. A key element in our research design was to control for participants' naturally occurring social beliefs, and taking these a priori beliefs into account allow us to elicit individual preferences in accordance with economic approaches that stress the dynamics of ambiguity preference as a function of underlying likelihoods. Using this design, we find a behavioral main effect of ambiguity aversion, with increasing ambiguity aversion as a function of higher beliefs regarding the likelihood of reciprocity, and related neural activity in the right IPS. This brain region was primarily involved when participants experienced lottery-based uncertainty as opposed to social uncertainty. However, we found that the right IFG was more involved when participants made decisions under social, as compared to non-social, uncertainty. Overall, therefore, the IPS may activate an analytic mindset, which might resonate more with a lottery than a social context, whereas the IFG is engaged when the context requires players to resolve uncertainty, such as unraveling the intentions behind the choice of another person.
不确定性决策的研究主要集中在使用标准彩票设计来理解对风险或模糊性的偏好上。然而，人们经常面临直接源自与他人互动的不确定性，这种不确定性可能与基于彩票的不确定性不同。在这里，我们通过研究不确定性的四个来源和类型，大大扩展了不确定性的研究，评估了风险和模糊性在社会和非社会背景下的行为和神经反应。我们研究设计的一个关键要素是控制参与者自然产生的社会信念，并考虑这些先验信念，使我们能够根据强调模糊性偏好作为潜在可能性函数的动态的经济方法来引出个人偏好。使用这种设计，我们发现了对模糊性的厌恶的行为主要影响，随着对互惠可能性的信念增加，对模糊性的厌恶也随之增加，并且在右侧 IPS 中存在相关的神经活动。与社会不确定性相比，当参与者体验基于彩票的不确定性时，该大脑区域主要参与其中。然而，当参与者在社会不确定性下做出决策时，我们发现 IFG 右侧更为活跃。因此，总体而言，IPS 可能会激活一种分析思维模式，这种模式可能与彩票更相关，而不是社会情境，而 IFG 则在需要玩家解决不确定性的情境下被激活，例如解开另一个人选择背后的意图。
