• You have a nasty skin rash and need one of two treatments: either one with a 75% chance of working or one (the ambiguous one) with somewhere between a 60% and 90% chance of working. Which do you prefer?
• Some prior work shows that people tend to be ambiguity seeking with respect to medical treatments – they would prefer the 60-to-90% option! But perhaps the reason underlying the fact that the probability of success is uncertain affects how people feel about the ambiguous treatment?
• Study 1 concerns two alternative reasons for ambiguity in a treatment. In one condition, the range of probabilities is attributed to different outcomes from different research studies; in the alternative condition, the ambiguity is said to arise from the medicine coming from two otherwise identical production batches, one of which has a lower probability of working than the other.
• The subjects are a combination of Amazon Mturk participants and university students, with an overall n of 492.
• Both conditions, that is, both explanations for the ambiguity present in one of the health treatments, give rise to some ambiguity aversion – not ambiguity seeking, as some previous literature had suggested to be exhibited in the health domain. In both conditions, nearly two-thirds of participants prefer the unambiguous option. Further, on average, participants indicated that their beliefs about the likelihood of a treatment working were lower for the ambiguous treatment than for the unambiguous treatment.
• A second study was performed utilizing university students, with n=271. This study replicated study 1, except the ambiguity condition that previously had been attributed to varying results from research studies now was attributed to variations in the overall health status of the patients. (The alternative ambiguity explanation, concerning different production batches, remained the same.) The idea is that people might tend to have optimistic views of their health status, and further, they have some locus of control over their physical condition. Previous literature suggests that these features might induce a preference for ambiguity.
• When the ambiguity was tied to one's overall health status, ambiguity aversion (on average) disappeared. Further, people who rated their health highly were likely to take the ambiguous option when it was tied to overall health.
• A third study (Mturk, n=242) looked more at self-focused attributions for ambiguity, beyond overall health. Now the ambiguity was tied either to: (1) how regularly you apply the medicinal cream; or (2) the strength of your immune system; or (3) your genetic makeup. A fourth condition brought back the "different results from different research studies" explanation of study 1.
• Study 3 also tried out two different conditions for the underlying probability of success, one centered on 75% and one centered on 25%.
• Attributions 1 – application regularity – and 2 – immune system strength – led to rather massive ambiguity seeking! [The other ambiguity explanations led to ambiguity neutrality.] People indicate (in attributions 1 and 2) that they were optimistic about the resolution of the ambiguity. Indeed, folks seem excessively optimistic about the relative power of their immune systems.
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