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Tolerance to ambiguous uncertainty predicts prosocial behavior
Uncertainty is a fundamental feature of human life that can be fractioned into two distinct psychological constructs: risk (known probabilistic outcomes) and ambiguity (unknown probabilistic outcomes). Although risk and ambiguity are known to powerfully bias nonsocial decision-making, their influenc...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2018
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5997641/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29895948 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-04631-9 |
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author | Vives, Marc-Lluís FeldmanHall, Oriel |
author_facet | Vives, Marc-Lluís FeldmanHall, Oriel |
author_sort | Vives, Marc-Lluís |
collection | PubMed |
description | Uncertainty is a fundamental feature of human life that can be fractioned into two distinct psychological constructs: risk (known probabilistic outcomes) and ambiguity (unknown probabilistic outcomes). Although risk and ambiguity are known to powerfully bias nonsocial decision-making, their influence on prosocial behavior remains largely unexplored. Here we show that ambiguity attitudes, but not risk attitudes, predict prosocial behavior: the greater an individual’s ambiguity tolerance, the more they engage in costly prosocial behaviors, both during decisions to cooperate (experiments 1 and 3) and choices to trust (experiment 2). Once the ambiguity associated with another’s actions is sufficiently resolved, this relationship between ambiguity tolerance and prosocial choice is eliminated (experiment 3). Taken together, these results provide converging evidence that attitudes toward ambiguity are a robust predictor of one’s willingness to engage in costly social behavior, which suggests a mechanism for the underlying motivations of prosocial action. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5997641 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2018 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-59976412018-06-14 Tolerance to ambiguous uncertainty predicts prosocial behavior Vives, Marc-Lluís FeldmanHall, Oriel Nat Commun Article Uncertainty is a fundamental feature of human life that can be fractioned into two distinct psychological constructs: risk (known probabilistic outcomes) and ambiguity (unknown probabilistic outcomes). Although risk and ambiguity are known to powerfully bias nonsocial decision-making, their influence on prosocial behavior remains largely unexplored. Here we show that ambiguity attitudes, but not risk attitudes, predict prosocial behavior: the greater an individual’s ambiguity tolerance, the more they engage in costly prosocial behaviors, both during decisions to cooperate (experiments 1 and 3) and choices to trust (experiment 2). Once the ambiguity associated with another’s actions is sufficiently resolved, this relationship between ambiguity tolerance and prosocial choice is eliminated (experiment 3). Taken together, these results provide converging evidence that attitudes toward ambiguity are a robust predictor of one’s willingness to engage in costly social behavior, which suggests a mechanism for the underlying motivations of prosocial action. Nature Publishing Group UK 2018-06-12 /pmc/articles/PMC5997641/ /pubmed/29895948 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-04631-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2018 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article Vives, Marc-Lluís FeldmanHall, Oriel Tolerance to ambiguous uncertainty predicts prosocial behavior |
title | Tolerance to ambiguous uncertainty predicts prosocial behavior |
title_full | Tolerance to ambiguous uncertainty predicts prosocial behavior |
title_fullStr | Tolerance to ambiguous uncertainty predicts prosocial behavior |
title_full_unstemmed | Tolerance to ambiguous uncertainty predicts prosocial behavior |
title_short | Tolerance to ambiguous uncertainty predicts prosocial behavior |
title_sort | tolerance to ambiguous uncertainty predicts prosocial behavior |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5997641/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29895948 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-04631-9 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT vivesmarclluis tolerancetoambiguousuncertaintypredictsprosocialbehavior AT feldmanhalloriel tolerancetoambiguousuncertaintypredictsprosocialbehavior |