Curley, Yates & Abram, 1986 : replication and extensions

Abstract

Ambiguity avoidance is a phenomenon that refers to people’s tendency to prefer choice options with lower ambiguity. Curley et al. (1986) attempted to uncover ambiguity aversion's psychological mechanisms. We conducted a pre-registered close replication of Curley et al. (1986)’s Study 1 and extensions of conceptual replications of their Studies 2 and 4 with an online US American Amazon Mechanical Turk sample (Post-exclusion N = 804, Pre-exclusion N = 855). In our replication of Study 1, we found support for the associations between risk aversion and ambiguity aversion (r(198) = .38, 95% CI [0.26, 0.46]) and found support for ambiguity avoidance (𝑉̂𝐶𝑟𝑎𝑚𝑒𝑟 = 0.18, 95% CI [.05, 0.27]). In our extensions, we found support for hostility bias (h = 2.66, 95% CI [2.43, 2.90]), anticipated future regret (d = 1.43, 95%CI [1.09, 1.77]), and evaluation by others (d = 1.41, 95% CI [1.07, 1.74]) as being psychological reasons for ambiguity aversion. Supplementary materials, data, and code are available on the OSF: https://osf.io/ycxh3/.