Dan Ohad, Xu Chelsea Y, Jia Ruonan, Wertheimer Emily K, Chawla Megha, Fuhrmann Alpert Galit, Fried Terri, Levy Ifat
Department of Comparative Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA.
Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
Sci Rep. 2025 Jan 24;15(1):3119. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-87644-x.
Uncertainty lies at the heart of everyday choices, affecting both decisions about precise quantities and those with less tangible, more qualitative, outcomes. Previous literature on decisions under uncertainty focused on alternatives with quantifiable outcomes, for example monetary lotteries. In such scenarios, decision-makers make decisions based on success chance, outcome magnitude, and individual preferences for uncertainty. It is not clear, however, how individuals construct subjective values when outcomes are not directly quantifiable. To explore how decision-makers choose between non-quantifiable uncertain outcomes, we focus here on medical decisions with qualitative outcomes. Specifically, we ask whether decision-makers exhibit similar attitudes towards uncertainty, focusing on ambiguity, across domains with quantitative and qualitative outcomes. We designed an online decision-making task where participants made binary choices between alternatives offering either guaranteed low outcomes or potentially better outcomes that were associated with some uncertainty. Outcomes were either hypothetical monetary gains of varying magnitudes or levels of improvement in a hypothetical medical condition. We recruited 429 online participants and repeated the survey in two waves, which allowed us to compare the between-domain attitude consistency with within-domain consistency over time. We found that uncertainty attitudes were moderately correlated across domains and time. We discuss the implications and applicability of our paradigm to broader contexts with non-quantifiable outcomes.
不确定性是日常选择的核心，它影响着关于精确数量的决策以及那些结果更难以捉摸、更具定性的决策。以往关于不确定性下决策的文献主要关注具有可量化结果的备选方案，例如货币彩票。在这种情况下，决策者基于成功概率、结果大小以及对不确定性的个人偏好来做出决策。然而，当结果不可直接量化时，个体如何构建主观价值尚不清楚。为了探究决策者如何在不可量化的不确定结果之间进行选择，我们在此聚焦于具有定性结果的医疗决策。具体而言，我们研究决策者在具有定量和定性结果的不同领域中，对于不确定性（特别是模糊性）是否表现出相似的态度。我们设计了一项在线决策任务，让参与者在提供有保证的低结果的备选方案和可能更好但存在一定不确定性的结果之间进行二选一。结果要么是不同幅度的假设货币收益，要么是假设医疗状况的改善程度。我们招募了429名在线参与者，并分两波重复进行了调查，这使我们能够比较不同领域之间的态度一致性以及随时间变化的领域内一致性。我们发现，不确定性态度在不同领域和不同时间之间存在适度的相关性。我们讨论了我们的范式在具有不可量化结果的更广泛背景下的意义和适用性。
