Ambiguity Aversion and Self-Evaluation

人们经常面对关于他们的风险、技能、个性特征和观点的模糊信息。 患者可能需要科普关于可选保护行为价值的看似矛盾的建议（例如，前列腺癌筛查），员工可能会收到一系列关于他们工作表现的反馈，学生可能需要整合一系列可能存在差异的信息，以便做出合理的学术和职业决定。 决策科学的研究表明，人们通常不喜欢上面描述的各种模糊性。 另一方面，社会心理学的研究表明，人们试图利用模糊性来为自己谋利。 他们更有可能相信自己在可以用许多不同方式定义的维度上上级同龄人（例如，领导能力）而不是更明确定义的维度（例如，准时）。 此外，他们更有可能认为自己上级定义模糊的参照物（例如，“普通”人）而不是相对于更明确定义的指称物（例如，特定的熟人）。 这些独立的研究表明，需要更好地理解模糊性在自我判断、对个人反馈的反应和决策中所起的作用。 本研究报告探讨了这些问题。 该项目包括三个实验。 实验1将呈现基于机会的游戏和基于技能的游戏，其获胜概率在模糊性方面有所不同。 据预测，人们会更喜欢基于技能的游戏，即使在机会游戏的获胜概率是模糊的，特别是当他们的获胜机会是由模糊的表现。 实验的设计是这样的，这种模式将反映模糊厌恶，尽管高能力的看法，因此将与决策科学和自我评价文献。 实验2和实验3将检验一个假设，即人们更喜欢与任务表现相关的游戏，而这些任务的反馈是模棱两可的。 为了区分个人能力和可控性的混杂效应，所有实验都将包括对参与者认为他人应该如何表现的测量，并且其中一个将改变是否在未来或过去发生的表现（可控性低，因为过去的表现无法改变）。

People often face ambiguous information about their risks, skills, personality attributes, and opinions. Patients may need to cope with seemingly conflicting advice about the value of optional protective behaviors (e.g., prostate cancer screening), employees may receive a range of feedback about their job performance, and students may need to integrate an array of potentially discrepant information in order to make reasoned academic and career decisions. Research in the decision sciences suggests that people are often averse to the sorts of ambiguity described above. On the other hand, research in social psychology suggests that people try to use ambiguity to their advantage. They are more likely to believe they are superior to their peers on dimensions that can be defined many different ways (e.g., leadership ability) than on dimensions that are more unambiguously defined (e.g., punctuality). Moreover, they are more likely to see themselves as being superior relative to ambiguously defined referents (e.g., the "average" person) than relative to more unambiguously defined referents (e.g., a specific acquaintance). These separate lines of research suggest a need to better understand the role that ambiguity plays in self-judgment, reactions to personal feedback, and decision-making. This study examines these issues. The project consists of three experiments. Experiment 1 will present chance-based games and skill-based games with probabilities of winning that vary in ambiguity. It is predicted that people will prefer the skill-based games even when the probabilities of winning the chance games are ambiguous, and particularly when their chances of winning are contingent on ambiguous performance. The design of the experiment is such that this sort of pattern would reflect ambiguity aversion despite perceptions of high competence, and would therefore be consistent with both the decision science and self-evaluation literatures. Experiments 2 and 3 will test the hypothesis that people prefer games linked to performance on tasks for which they have received ambiguous feedback. In order to separate the confounding effects of personal competence and controllability, all experiments will include measures of how participants believe others should behave, and one will vary whether performance has occurred in the future or in the past (where controllability is low because past performance cannot be altered).