人们会对存在风险做出次优决策

IF 2.8 1区心理学 Q1 PSYCHOLOGY, EXPERIMENTAL

Cognition Pub Date : 2025-07-21 DOI:10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106216

Adam Elga , Jian-Qiao Zhu , Thomas L. Griffiths

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引用次数: 0

摘要

分配资源以最大化人类在一系列存在风险中生存的概率与许多决策问题的结构不同，因为目标是预期结果概率的乘积，而不是总和。我们推导出这个问题的最优解，并使用这个解来评估人们在面对具有这种乘法结构的决策时所做的选择。我们的参与者（总N= 2072）对风险对投资的反应程度相当敏感，但他们的决策比较保守，没有为生存概率较低的风险分配足够的资源。即使在强调生存概率的其他框架中，这种模式仍然存在。我们的研究结果强调了人们在如何应对存在风险方面的直觉存在系统性缺陷，并表明人们在涉及倍增目标的决策方面可能特别困难。

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People make suboptimal decisions about existential risks

Allocating resources to maximize the probability that humanity survives a set of existential risks has a different structure from many decision problems, as the objective is the product of the probabilities of desired outcomes rather than the sum. We derive the optimal solution to this problem and use this solution to evaluate the choices that people make when presented with decisions that have this multiplicative structure. Our participants (total

N

=2,072) are appropriately sensitive to how responsive a risk is to investment, but are conservative in their decisions and do not allocate enough resources to risks with lower probability of survival. This pattern persists even with alternative framings that emphasize survival probabilities. Our results highlight a systematic flaw in people’s intuitions about how to respond to existential risks, and suggest that people may have particular difficulty with decisions that involve multiplicative objectives.

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来源期刊

Cognition PSYCHOLOGY, EXPERIMENTAL-

CiteScore

6.40

自引率

5.90%

发文量

283

期刊介绍： Cognition is an international journal that publishes theoretical and experimental papers on the study of the mind. It covers a wide variety of subjects concerning all the different aspects of cognition, ranging from biological and experimental studies to formal analysis. Contributions from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, computer science, mathematics, ethology and philosophy are welcome in this journal provided that they have some bearing on the functioning of the mind. In addition, the journal serves as a forum for discussion of social and political aspects of cognitive science.