From: "Gary Britt" 

Now we know why lefties nuance things into inaction and are lousy leaders.

Gary

"Rich Gauszka"  wrote in message
news:439dbb81{at}w3.nls.net...
> 'The brain responds emotionally and often illogically when forced to make
> decisions based on little or conflicting evidence, a new study suggests.'
>
>
>
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20051212/sc_space/howambiguitymesseswithourbrains
>
> How Ambiguity Messes with Our Brains
> The brain responds emotionally and often illogically when forced to make
> decisions based on little or conflicting evidence, a new study suggests.
>
> ambiguous decisions and are different from risky decisions.
>
>
> In a risky decision, a person is uncertain about the outcome of their
choice
> but has an idea of the probability of success. In an ambiguous decision, a
> person is ignorant of both factors.
>
>
> "Psychologists would say ambiguity is the discomfort from knowing there is
> something you don't know that you wish you did," said Colin Camerer, an
> economist at the California Institute of Technology and the primary
> researcher in the study.
>
>
> In the experiment, test subjects made ambiguous bets while their brains
were
> scanned using a functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI).
>
>
> In one example, the subjects were given the choice between betting money
on
> the chances of drawing a red card from a "risky" deck that had 20 red
cards
> and 20 black cards-that is, where the probability of choosing either color
> was 50:50-and making the same bet with an "ambiguous" deck
where the color
> composition of the cards was unknown.
>
>
> In most cases, the subjects chose to make the risky bet. Logically,
however,
> both bets would have been equally good because in both cases, the chance
of
> pulling a red card on the first draw was 50:50.
>
>
> The brain scans revealed that ambiguous wagers were often accompanied by
> activation of the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), two areas of
the
> brain that are involved in the processing of emotions. In particular, the
> amygdala has been found to be closely associated with fear.
>
>
> A correlation between aversion to ambiguous decisions and activation of
> emotional parts of the brain makes sense from an evolutionary point of
view,
> Camerer said. "Freezing in the face of danger is an old, emotional
response
> which probably was evolutionarily adaptive in our ancestral past."
>
>
> In the modern human brain, this translates into a reluctance to bet on or
> against an event if it seems at all ambiguous.
>
>
> The finding could help scientists understand how humans make decisions in
> the real world, because the choices people make are often based on very
> limited information, Camerer told LiveScience.
>
>
> "If you think about it, how often do you know the probability of
success?"
> he said. "Probably, the situation we modeled with the risk game is more
the
> exception than the rule."
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

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