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Ambiguity Aversion

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences

  • 179 Accesses

Synonyms

Pessimism; Uncertainty

Definition

The preference for known risks over unknown risks

Introduction

When you are faced with a decision, the first thing you may consider are the consequences – what happens when I take this action? For instance, when you consider going parachute jumping you expect this to be a lot of fun, but you also take into account that there is a chance you can get into an accident. To get an estimate about these odds you can go to the website of the United States Parachute Associations (http://www.uspa.org/facts-faqs/safety) and look up the numbers: the data from the last 10 years suggest there is a 1 in 130,000 chance of a fatality. However, for most decisions that we are confronted with, we rarely know the exact probability and outcome distributions associated with them, nor are those distributions available. For instance, what are the chances that we would actually like the experience of parachute jumping? And if so how much fun would it really be? If you...

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References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany

    Wouter van den Bos

  2. Department of Developmental Psychology University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Wouter van den Bos

Authors
  1. Wouter van den Bos
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wouter van den Bos .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland University, Rochester, USA

    Virgil Zeigler-Hill

  2. Oakland University, Rochester, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. Institute of Psychology, University of Lodz, Smugowa 10/12, 91-433, Lodz, Poland

    Monika Wróbel

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© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG

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van den Bos, W. (2017). Ambiguity Aversion. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_2290-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_2290-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

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