风险决策是人类赖以生存和发展的重大决策。如何进行风险决策是人类不断认识和改造世界过程中遇到的未解之谜。主流风险理论认为,风险决策是一个补偿性的、期望值最大化的过程;而非主流的风险理论则认为,风险决策是非补偿性的,并不遵循期望法则所假设的加权求和等过程。这一谜团为何一直没有得以破解,或许是因为我们未找到揭示其心理过程的令人信服的证据。近10年来,我们针对风险决策过程,借助行为实验、眼动记录法、事件相关电位、功能磁共振成像等技术,系统探索风险决策的心理和神经机制,为回答“风险决策是否遵循补偿性规则”这一问题提供了汇聚性证据。本文依据期望法则所假设的概率函数推导、加权过程、加权求和过程、总分最大化等步骤,对这些研究进行梳理与回顾,以期加深人们对风险决策机制的理解,并为建立、健全与风险决策相关的政策、法律法规提供理论依据。
Decision making under risk is vital to human survival and development. How to make a risky choice is a compelling question facing scientists today. Mainstream theories of decision making under risk hold that risky choices are based on a compensatory expectation-maximizing process. Some researchers, however, argued that risky choice is based on a non-compensatory process, foregoing weighting and summing. People rely on only one (or a few) key dimension (s) rather than integrating information from all dimensions of an option for making a decision. To tackle this question and further our knowledge of the mechanism underlying human decision making, concrete and convincing evidence based on psychological process is required. Therefore, over the past decade, we designed and conducted a series of behavioral and neural experiments to systematically investigate the process of risky decision making. We organized and presented our experiments in line with the computation steps assumed by the expectation rule, that is, from the process of deriving probability functions, to weighting process, to weighting and summing process, and then to maximizing overall values. This review illustrates how these "independent" studies can help us to gradually understand the global process underlying risky choices, thereby providing psychology- and neuroscience-based theoretical foundations for establishing and stipulating risk related policies, laws, and regulations.