Epistemic and aleatory uncertainty in decisions from experience

Author(s): Holwerda, Joel; Newell, Ben | Abstract: People intuitively distinguish between uncertainty they believe is potentially resolvable and uncertainty that arises from inherently stochastic processes. The vast majority of experiments investigating decisions based on experience, however, have focused exclusively on scenarios that promote a stochastic interpretation by representing options as images that remain identical each time they are presented. In the current research, we contrasted this method with one in which the visual appearance of options was subtly differentiated each time participants encountered them. We found that introducing this variability to the appearance of options influenced the way people interpreted uncertainty. Although there was little evidence of an impact on exploration, these differences in interpretation may reveal other limitations to the generalisability of previous decision-making tasks.