Decisions With Uncertainty: The Glass Half Full

Abstract

Each of us makes important decisions involving uncertainty in domains in which we are not experts, such as retirement planning, medical treatment, and precautions against severe weather. Often, reliable information about uncertainty is available to us, although how effectively we incorporate it into the decision process remains in question. Previous research suggests that people are error-prone when reasoning with probability. However, recent research in weatherrelated decision making is more encouraging. Unlike earlier work that compares people's decisions with a rational standard, this research compares decisions made by people with and without uncertainty information. The results suggest that including specific numeric uncertainty estimates in weather forecasts increases trust and gives people a better idea of what to expect in terms of both the range of possible outcomes and the amount of uncertainty in the particular situation, all of which benefit precautionary decisions. However, the advantage for uncertainty estimates depends critically on how they are expressed. It is crucial that the expression is compatible with both the decision task and cognitive processes of the user.

Communication and interpretation of regional weather forecasts: a survey of the Italian public

“…Recent studies claim that expressing the uncertainty in forecasts can be useful to users of weather information and can improve decisions based on those forecasts (Roulston et al ., ; Joslyn et al ., ; Roulston and Kaplan, ; Nadav‐Greenberg and Joslyn, ; Morss et al ., ; Savelli and Joslyn, ; Joslyn and LeClerc, , ).…”

Probabilistic Interval Forecasts: An Individual Differences Approach to Understanding Forecast Communication

“…Indeed, there is a large literature suggesting that people have trouble understanding probabilistic information [1][2][3][4][5], violate axioms of utility theory, respond to probabilities nonlinearly, and ignore prior probabilities [6][7][8][9][10]. Nonetheless, recent psychological research suggests that people can benefit from fairly complex expressions of uncertainty in the sense that they make better decisions when uncertainty information is available compared to when it is omitted [11].…”

Mobile weather apps or the illusion of certainty

“…Few features arising from the selected sample of weather apps seem not to be in line either with the recommendations issued by the US National Research Council (NRC, , ), the American Meteorological Society (AMS, ; Hirschberg et al , ) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO, ) to enhance the usefulness of weather information conveying uncertainty, or with several recent studies claiming that expressing the uncertainty in forecasts can be useful to users and can improve decisions based on those forecasts (Roulston et al , ; Joslyn et al , ; Nadav‐Greenberg and Joslyn, ; Roulston and Kaplan, ; Morss et al , ; Joslyn and LeClerc, , ; Savelli and Joslyn, ).…”

“…The present study is focused on how uncertainty information is included in weather forecast communication, a theme that has recently been investigated widely and represents one of the challenges in improving the effectiveness of the forecast dissemination process (Gigerenzer et al , ; Roulston et al , ; Joslyn et al , ; Morss et al , , ; Nadav‐Greenberg and Joslyn, ; Roulston and Kaplan, ; Joslyn and LeClerc, , ; Savelli and Joslyn, ; Peachey et al , ; Sivle et al , ; Abraham et al , ; Zabini et al , ).…”