Divergent attitudes toward ambiguous and conflicting information

Abstract

A prevalent yet understudied type of uncertainty emerges when several sources provide conflicting information. We explore how decision-makers interpret informational conflicts and make decisions under such uncertainty, testing the hypothesis that conflicts are interpreted as ambiguity. For example, that two conflicting sources, one reporting a 25% success chance of some procedure and another reporting a 75% chance, are interpreted as an ambiguous range of 25%-75% success chance. In a behavioral paradigm, we presented participants with choices involving different types of uncertainty and monetary outcomes. We found that in choices that contrasted low certain outcomes with high uncertain outcomes framed as either conflict or ambiguity, attitudes to conflict and ambiguity were indistinguishable. In contrast, participants expressed an overwhelming aversion to conflict in choices between identical conflicting and ambiguous lotteries. We suggest that this shift in preference reflects context-dependent attitudes to conflict. In isolation, decision-makers reduce conflict to ambiguity. It is only in its comparative form that conflict is associated with highly aversive attitudes. In exploratory analysis, we found that conflict attitudes had a weak association with trait consciousness, but not with trait agreeableness, or anticipated regret, nor could it be explained by subjective probability. We discuss the relevance of our findings to advice-giving, and to information communicators who, in our polarizing societies, report more and more conflicting information.