Judgment Extremity and Accuracy Under Epistemic vs. Aleatory Uncertainty

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Tannenbaum, David; Fox, Craig R.; Ulkumen, Gulden
• 署名单位: Utah System of Higher Education; University of Utah; University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; University of Southern California
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2015.2344
• 发表日期: 2017
• 页码: 497-518
• 关键词: probability; uncertainty; JUDGMENT; accuracy; forecasting; Decision Analysis

摘要

People viewuncertain events as knowable in principle (epistemic uncertainty), as fundamentally random (aleatory uncertainty), or as some mixture of the two. We showthat people make more extreme probability judgments (i. e., closer to 0 or 1) for events they view as entailing more epistemic uncertainty and less aleatory uncertainty. We demonstrate this pattern in a domain where there is agreement concerning the balance of evidence (pairings of teams according to their seed in a basketball tournament) but individual differences in the perception of the epistemicness/aleatoriness of that domain (Study 1), across a range of domains that vary in their perceived epistemicness/aleatoriness (Study 2), in a single judgment task for which we only vary the degree of randomness with which events are selected (Study 3), and when we prime participants to see events as more epistemic or aleatory (Study 4). Decomposition of accuracy scores suggests that the greater judgment extremity of more epistemic events can manifest itself as a trade-off between enhanced resolution and diminished calibration. We further relate our findings to the hard-easy effect and also show that differences between epistemic and aleatory judgment are amplified when judges have more knowledge concerning relevant events.