Choosing one, ignoring the other: Binary choice-making and easily accessible information under uncertainty

Author

Youngjin Kang*

Department of Psychology, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, United States of America

Abstract

Earlier research has found that people become overconfident in evaluating the correctness of information if the information is accessed in the mind with ease and without contradictory information. The current research investigated whether this phenomenon also occurs in choice-making involving two alternatives: one very familiar, the other entirely unknown. The initial hypothesis was that people confidently make a choice based only on the information of a familiar alternative, while underestimating the possibility of an unknown alternative being the correct answer. The experimental results confirmed this hypothesis. Subsequently, two hypotheses were suggested as possible psychological processes behind this phenomenon: (1) Having information about one alternative reduces uncertainty, and subsequently choosing that alternative creates positive affect, while the other alternative is entirely unknown so it remains too uncertain to be chosen, (2) People create a mental map from the information of a familiar alternative, and choose either a familiar or unknown alternative by using a probabilistic guess based on this map. Multiple experiments were conducted, and their results delivered evidence for both hypotheses and revealed the variables which potentially influence this phenomenon.

Keywords: choice-making; information; confidence; uncertainty; heuristics

PAGES:135-174

doi:10.24193/cbb.2017.21.09

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