Exploiting risk-reward structures in decision making under uncertainty
Exploiting risk-reward structures in decision making under uncertainty
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DOI：
10.1016/j.cognition.2018.02.019
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发表时间：
2018-06-01
期刊：
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
Pleskac, Timothy J.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Leuker, Christina;Pachur, Thorsten;Pleskac, Timothy J.
人们经常不得不在不确定的情况下做出决定，也就是说，在获得回报的概率未知或至少难以确定的情况下。这个问题的一个解决方案是从潜在回报的大小推断概率，从而利用环境中许多领域中出现的回报和概率之间的反比关系。在这里，我们研究了大脑是如何实现这样一个解决方案的：(1)人们是否从环境中学习风险回报关系，如果是，如何学习？(2)不确定性下习得的风险回报关系如何影响决策偏好？在三个实验（N = 352）中，我们发现参与者可以通过暴露于具有负、正或不相关风险回报关系的选择环境中来学习风险回报关系。他们能够从明确陈述收益和概率的赌博（实验1和2）和关于认知事件的赌博（实验3）中学习这些关联。在不确定性下的后续决策中，参与者经常通过从收益的大小推断概率来利用习得关联。这一推论系统地影响了他们在不确定性下的偏好：在低收益情况下，暴露于负风险回报关系的参与者倾向于选择不确定的选项，而不是较小的确定选项，但在高收益情况下则不会。这种模式在积极条件下发生逆转，在不相关条件下消失。这种偏好的适应性变化与风险奖励启发式的使用是一致的。
People often have to make decisions under uncertainty that is, in situations where the probabilities of obtaining a payoff are unknown or at least difficult to ascertain. One solution to this problem is to infer the probability from the magnitude of the potential payoff and thus exploit the inverse relationship between payoffs and probabilities that occurs in many domains in the environment. Here, we investigated how the mind may implement such a solution: (1) Do people learn about risk reward relationships from the environment and if so, how? (2) How do learned risk reward relationships impact preferences in decision-making under uncertainty? Across three experiments (N = 352), we found that participants can learn risk reward relationships from being exposed to choice environments with a negative, positive, or uncorrelated risk reward relationship. They were able to learn the associations both from gambles with explicitly stated payoffs and probabilities (Experiments 1 & 2) and from gambles about epistemic events (Experiment 3). In subsequent decisions under uncertainty, participants often exploited the learned association by inferring probabilities from the magnitudes of the payoffs. This inference systematically influenced their preferences under uncertainty: Participants who had been exposed to a negative risk reward relationship tended to prefer the uncertain option over a smaller sure option for low payoffs, but not for high payoffs. This pattern reversed in the positive condition and disappeared in the uncorrelated condition. This adaptive change in preferences is consistent with the use of the risk reward heuristic.