Dan Ohad, Sanghvi Maya, 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 Jul 16;15(1):25748. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-11433-9.
A prevalent yet understudied type of uncertainty emerges when several sources provide conflicting information. We explore how decision-makers interpret informational conflicts and make decisions under such uncertainty, testing the hypothesis that conflicts are interpreted as ambiguity. For example, that two conflicting sources, one reporting a 25% success chance of some procedure and another reporting a 75% chance, are interpreted as an ambiguous range of 25%-75% success chance. In a behavioral paradigm, we presented participants with choices involving different types of uncertainty and monetary outcomes. We found that in choices that contrasted low certain outcomes with high uncertain outcomes framed as either conflict or ambiguity, attitudes to conflict and ambiguity were indistinguishable. In contrast, participants expressed an overwhelming aversion to conflict in choices between identical conflicting and ambiguous lotteries. We suggest that this shift in preference reflects context-dependent attitudes to conflict. In isolation, decision-makers reduce conflict to ambiguity. It is only in its comparative form that conflict is associated with highly aversive attitudes. In exploratory analysis, we found that conflict attitudes had a weak association with trait consciousness, but not with trait agreeableness, or anticipated regret, nor could it be explained by subjective probability. We discuss the relevance of our findings to advice-giving, and to information communicators who, in our polarizing societies, report more and more conflicting information.
当多个信息源提供相互冲突的信息时，就会出现一种普遍但研究不足的不确定性类型。我们探讨了决策者如何解释信息冲突并在这种不确定性下做出决策，检验了冲突被解释为模糊性的假设。例如，两个相互冲突的信息源，一个报告某种程序有25%的成功几率，另一个报告有75%的几率，这被解释为25% - 75%的模糊成功几率范围。在一个行为范式中，我们向参与者提供了涉及不同类型不确定性和货币结果的选择。我们发现，在将低确定性结果与高不确定性结果对比呈现为冲突或模糊性的选择中，对冲突和模糊性的态度是无法区分的。相比之下，在相同的冲突性和模糊性彩票之间的选择中，参与者对冲突表现出强烈的厌恶。我们认为这种偏好的转变反映了对冲突的情境依赖态度。孤立地看，决策者将冲突简化为模糊性。只有在其比较形式中，冲突才与高度厌恶的态度相关联。在探索性分析中，我们发现冲突态度与特质意识有微弱关联，但与特质宜人性、预期遗憾无关，也无法用主观概率来解释。我们讨论了我们的发现对提供建议以及对在我们两极分化的社会中报告越来越多冲突信息的信息传播者的相关性。
