A decision may be difficult because complex information processing is required to evaluate choices according to deterministic decision rules and/or because it is not certain which choice will lead to the best outcome in a probabilistic context. Factors that tax decision making such as decision rule complexity and low decision certainty should be disambiguated for a more complete understanding o...

This paper is about using prosody to automatically detect one aspect of a speaker’s internal state: their level of certainty. While past work on classifying level of certainty used the perceived level of certainty as the value to predict, we find that this quantity often differs from a speaker’s actual level of certainty as gauged by self-reports. In this work we build models to predict a speak...

Despite the ubiquity of conflict, it is not inevitable. In any given dispute, other outcomes are possible. Why then does conflict grip us repeatedly despite the horrors that war veterans, movies, television, and history books promise? Undoubtedly, many factors specific to the time and place of a conflict are ultimately responsible for its occurrence. Here we explore one factor that may contribu...

How does a rumor come to be believed as a fact as it spreads across a chain of consumers? This research proposes that because consumers’ certainty about their beliefs (e.g., attitudes, opinions) is less salient than the beliefs themselves, certainty information is more susceptible to being lost in communication. Consistent with this idea, the current studies reveal that though consumers transmi...

People’s numeric probability estimates for 2 mutually exclusive and exhaustive events commonly sum to 1.0, which seems to indicate the full complementarity of subjective certainty in the 2 events (i.e., increases in certainty for one event are accompanied by decreases in certainty for the other). In this article, however, a distinction is made between the additivity of probability estimates and...

In patients with chronic diseases education should improve knowledge about the disease and increase certainty in knowledge. We present here a technique to measure changes in certainty after an educational intervention. For this purpose, before and after a course, patients answer a questionnaire in which answers are accompanied by an estimate of the degree of certainty. Answers are then assigned...