Probability expression for changeable and changeless uncertainties: an implicit test

"Everything changes and nothing remains still."We designed three implicit studies to understand how people react or adapt to a rapidly changing world by testing whether verbal probability is better in expressing changeable uncertainty while numerical probability is better in expressing unc...

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Published inFrontiers in psychology Vol. 5; p. 1313
Main Authors Wang, Yun, Du, Xue-Lei, Rao, Li-Lin, Li, Shu
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Switzerland Frontiers Media S.A 13.11.2014
Subjects
changeability feature
changeable uncertainty
numerical probability
Psychology
unchangeable uncertainty
verbal probability
changeability feature
numerical probability
verbal probability
unchangeable uncertainty
changeable uncertainty
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Summary:"Everything changes and nothing remains still."We designed three implicit studies to understand how people react or adapt to a rapidly changing world by testing whether verbal probability is better in expressing changeable uncertainty while numerical probability is better in expressing unchangeable uncertainty. We found that the "verbal-changeable" combination in implicit tasks was more compatible than the "numerical-changeable" combination. Furthermore, the "numerical-changeless" combination was more compatible than the "verbal-changeless" combination. Thus, a novel feature called "changeability" was proposed to describe the changeable nature of verbal probability. However, numerical probability is a better carrier of changeless uncertainty than verbal probability. These results extend the domain of probability predictions and enrich our general understanding of communication with verbal and numerical probabilities. Given that the world around us is constantly changing, this "changeability" feature may play a major role in preparing for uncertainty.
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Reviewed by: Shenghua Luan, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany; Eldad Yechiam, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
These authors have contributed equally to this work.
Edited by: Eddy J. Davelaar, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
ISSN:1664-1078
1664-1078
DOI:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01313