In recent weeks I have described how people think about risk. They use approaches very different from those implied by the models of quantitative finance and decision theory. They are influenced by what is salient, rather than what is probable. Events that are phenomenally unlikely – the winning of a large prize in the lottery or a child’s abduction by a paedophile – influence their thinking to a disproportionate degree because they grab attention. Few people think of uncertainty in terms of statistical distributions and are able to attach probabilities that add up to one to a well defined set of disparate outcomes. They tell stories about the future instead.
近幾周來(lái)我描述了人們對(duì)風(fēng)險(xiǎn)的看法。他們所使用的方法，與數(shù)量金融學(xué)和決策理論模型中所隱含的方法截然不同。影響人們對(duì)風(fēng)險(xiǎn)看法的是突出的因素，而非可能性高的因素。一些明顯不太可能發(fā)生的事件，比如抽中大獎(jiǎng)或孩子被戀童癖者綁架，對(duì)人們思維的影響之大，與這些事件發(fā)生的可能性不成比例，其原因就在于這些事件吸引人的注意力。很少有人從統(tǒng)計(jì)分布的角度思考不確定性，也很少有人能給一系列不同結(jié)果一一賦予概率，并且使概率之和為1。相反，大多數(shù)人對(duì)未來(lái)的事情是憑空想象。