Models of Uncertainty Due to Lack of Knowledge

这项研究将调查当人们只有不完整的知识时，他们是如何对陈述的真实性做出判断的。这个问题经常出现在从商业到公共政策到个人事务的各个领域。例如，可能会要求情报分析师对鲍里斯·叶利钦(Boris Yeltsin)在接下来的六个月里是否会继续掌权做出概率判断，环保局官员可能必须基于对某种物质对健康影响的稀少知识来为其设定污染标准，或者医生可能必须在没有确定的医疗数据的情况下选择治疗计划。这项工作将主要关注判断和反应选择的认知过程。这项研究将在以前工作的基础上，发展出可以表达为数学模型的心理学理论，对这些理论和模型进行实证检验，并对其进行相应的修改。这些模型将提供一个框架，用于区分一个人对一个命题是否属实的主观置信度，以及一个人做出或提供给其他人的公开决定或反应。一个人的自信程度取决于他对主题领域的了解，以及这些知识是如何组织和搜索的，而回答的选择则取决于动机和相关因素。这项研究将调查的一个问题涉及到某些已记录的现象之间的关系。其一是一种隐蔽的偏见，认为陈述是真实的。另一种是相对于个人的隐蔽判断(当回答选项被限制为真或假时)认为陈述为真的另一种偏见，但不倾向于分配陈述为真的概率(当回答选项是从0到100的数字时)。另一个问题涉及一个人搜索他或她的知识库的策略如何取决于他或她所面临的判断任务的具体形式和顺序。这项研究还将调查其他问题，包括判断过去和未来事件的差异，跨知识领域对陈述真实性的信心比较，对判断和反应的回报效应，以及知识程度和组织对判断的影响。这项工作的长远目标是提高裁判质量。应当有可能将这项工作中开发的判断数学模型与衍生的业绩衡量结合起来，以提高准确度或以可施加适当校正的方式进行校准。

This research will investigate how people make judgments about the truth of statements when they have only incomplete knowledge. The problem arises very frequently in areas ranging from business to public policy to personal matters. As examples, an intelligence analyst may be asked for a probability judgment of whether Boris Yeltsin will remain in power in Russia for the next six months, an EPA official may have to set a pollution standard for a substance based on sparse knowledge of its health effects, or a physician may have to select a treatment plan given inconclusive medical data. The work will focus primarily on the cognitive processes of judgment and response selection. The research will develop psychological theories, based on prior work, that can be expressed as mathematical models, test these theories and models empirically, and modify them accordingly. The models will provide a framework for distinguishing the subjective degree of confidence one has that a proposition is true from the overt decision or response one makes or provides to someone else. One's degree of confidence depends on what one knows about the topic area, as well as on how that knowledge is organized and searched, whereas the response selection depends on motivational and related factors. One question this research will investigate concerns the relationships among certain documented phenomena. One is a covert bias to think statements are true. The other is an additional bias to call statements true relative to one's covert judgment (when the response options are limited to true or false), but not a bias to assign probabilities that statements are true (when the response options are numbers from 0 to 100). Another question concerns how a person's strategy for searching his or her knowledge base depends on the specific form and sequence of the judgment tasks that he or she faces. Additional issues the research will investigate include differences in judging past versus future events, the comparison of confidence in the truth of statements across knowledge domains, payoff effects on judgment and responding, and effects of degree and organization of knowledge on judgment. The long-range goal of the work is to improve the quality of judgments. It should become possible to combine the mathematical models of judgment to be developed in this work with derived measures of performance either to improve accuracy or to calibrate it in a manner that suitable corrections can be imposed.