COPING WITH UNCERTAINTY - A NATURALISTIC DECISION-MAKING ANALYSIS

This paper is concerned with three questions: How do decision makers c onceptualize uncertainty? How do decision makers cope with uncertainty ? Are there systematic relationships between different conceptualizati ons of uncertainty and different methods of coping? To answer these qu estions we analyzed 102 self-reports of decision-making under uncertai nty with an inclusive method of classifying conceptualizations of unce rtainty and coping mechanisms developed from the decision-making liter ature. The results showed that decision makers distinguished among thr ee types of uncertainty: inadequate understanding, incomplete informat ion, and undifferentiated alternatives. To these they applied five str ategies of coping: reducing uncertainty, assumption-based reasoning, w eighing pros and cons of competing alternatives, suppressing uncertain ty, and forestalling. Inadequate understanding was primarily managed b y reduction, incomplete information was primarily managed by assumptio n-based reasoning, and conflict among alternatives was primarily manag ed by weighing pros and cons. Based on these results and findings from previous studies of naturalistic decision-making we hypothesized a R. A.W.F.S. (Reduction, Assumption-based reasoning, Weighing pros and con s, Suppression, and Hedging) heuristic, which describes the strategies that decision makers apply to different types of uncertainty in natur alistic settings. (C) 1997 Academic Press.