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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Step to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two in our series called The Devil You Know, which is about ambiguity aversion.

That's the observation that we prefer risks with known probabilities over risks with unknown probabilities, even if you have no reason for thinking that the unknown risks will be worse.

This preference is captured by the folk saying, better the devil you know than the devil you

don't. For the most part, people don't like taking bets when they don't know what the odds are,

and will pay up just to avoid having to deal with ambiguity. And this is funny in a way because

almost all of the decisions that we make in our actual lives are made with incomplete knowledge

and some significant amount of uncertainty about our likelihood of success. Very few things in

reality have clear objective odds like a fair coin flip or a dice roll.

However, it's pretty well established that most people, most of the time, do not like making

decisions under ambiguous conditions, and we will go to great lengths to avoid taking risks

with unknown probabilities. So in the last episode, after we introduced the

concept, we talked a good bit about the original piece of writing that made ambiguity aversion

...