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Tolerance to ambiguity is a key factor that determines the social decisions of cooperation among people

According to a study published on 12 June in the journal Nature Communications by  Marc-Lluís Vives, a researcher of the Center for Brain and Cognition, together with Oriel FeldmanHall, a researcher in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences of Brown University (USA).

13.06.2018

 

On Tuesday 12 June, the journal Nature Communications is publishing an article which shows the relationship between the tolerance to ambiguity of future expectations and collaborative social decisions. The goal of the research was to investigate whether purely individual attitudes of uncertainty share certain features with social decisions that involve trusting and cooperating with other people. The work has been carried out by Marc-Lluís Vives, a researcher of the Center for Brain and Cognition (CBC) at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) at UPF, in conjunction with Oriel FeldmanHall, a researcher of the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences of Brown University (USA).

"Individual attitudes of uncertainty can be useful in predicting prosocial and collaborative decisions"

The authors have used a classical distinction in Economics between two possible types of uncertaintyrisk and ambiguity. In the first case, the person explicitly knows the probabilities of each possible outcome; in the second case, the probabilities are unknown. The researchers hypothesized that social interactions are more similar to ambiguity than risk: when you cooperate with someone, you are not aware of the probability that the other person will cooperate with you. In accordance with their hypothesis, the results show that the prosocial decisions are only related to ambiguity attitudes, but not to risk.

Several classic paradigms of game theory have been used

For the experimental part of the research, the authors used various classic paradigms of game theory in which the participants had to take collaborative decisions:  public  goods game;  trust game and prisoner’s dilemma.  Before playing each game, the authors assessed each participant’s ambiguity and risk attitudes through a task in which participants had to decide if they wanted to play the lottery or if they preferred to obtain a guaranteed prize (€5). After this task, the participants played the collaborative games, and the researchers investigated whether the attitudes derived from the initial task were related to the decisions in the cooperation games.  The authors conducted three experiments of this kind.

In the first experiment they ascertained that people who are more tolerant to ambiguity decide to cooperate more. In the second experiment they found that attitudes of ambiguity are related to how much an individual trusts another. Finally, in the third experiment, although the people who are more tolerant to ambiguity also decide to cooperate more, it was observed that once the ambiguity associated with how the other partner will respond is resolved, this relationship disappears.

 These results lead one to believe that, “tolerance to ambiguity is a key factor determining our decisions to cooperate and trust others”, explains Vives. “And that only when we have clear information about what to expect from others does this association disappear”.

In addition, the results point to the idea that social norms are used to reduce social ambiguity, thus future research can help clarify whether an environment in which the expected norms are clearly known has a positive effect on those who are especially likely to be averse to ambiguity. 

Reference work:

Marc-Lluís Vives, Oriel FeldmanHall (2018), “Tolerance to ambiguous uncertainty predicts prosocial behavior”, Nature Communications, 12 June, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-04631-9

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