Decision Making Under Uncertain Categorization

• Main Authors: Stephanie Ying-Fen Chen, Gregory eMurphy, Brian eRoss
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2014-09-01
• Series: Frontiers in Psychology
• Subjects: Decision Making; framing; uncertainty; Categories; category-based induction
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00991/full

Two experiments investigated how category information is used in decision making under uncertainty and whether the framing of category information influences how it is used. Subjects were presented with vignettes in which the categorization of a critical item was ambiguous and were asked to choose among a set of actions with the goal of attaining the desired outcome for the main character in the story. The normative decision making strategy was to base the decision on all possible categories; however, research on a related topic, category-based induction, has found that people often only consider a single category when making predictions when categorization is uncertain. These experiments found that subjects tend to consider multiple categories when making decisions, but do so both when it is and is not appropriate, suggesting that use of multiple categories is not driven by an understanding of what categories are and are not relevant to the decision. Similarly, although a framing manipulation increased the rate of multiple-category use, it did so in situations in which multiple-category use was and was not appropriate.