Citation

Li R, Roberts RC, Huettel SA, Brannon EM. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 2017; 159: 319-326.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. Electronic address: ebrannon@sas.upenn.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.jecp.2017.02.013

PMID

28359540

Abstract

Ambiguity aversion arises when a decision maker prefers risky gambles with known probabilities over equivalent ambiguous gambles with unknown probabilities. This phenomenon has been consistently observed in adults across a large body of empirical work. Evaluating ambiguity aversion in young children, however, has posed methodological challenges because probabilistic representations appropriate for adults might not be understood by young children. Here, we established a novel method for representing risk and ambiguity with physical objects that overcomes previous methodological limitations and allows us to measure ambiguity aversion in young children. We found that individual 5-year-olds exhibited consistent choice preferences and, as a group, exhibited no ambiguity aversion in a task that evokes ambiguity aversion in adults. Across individuals, 5-year-olds exhibited greater variance in ambiguity preferences compared with adults tested under similar conditions. This suggests that ambiguity aversion is absent during early childhood and emerges over the course of development.

Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

Ambiguity; Ambiguity aversion; Decision making; Ellsberg; Risk; Uncertainty