An Analysis On The Factors Influencing Middle School Students’ Decision-making Performance Under Uncertainty And Its Effect On Academic Performance

Decision-making under uncertainty is a decision made when the outcome of alternative options is known but the probability is unknown.In uncertain condition,ambiguity tolerance is used to measure people’s willingness to choose uncertain options,and clue search performance is used to evaluate people’s decision-making behavior.An experimental study on comparison of decision-making under uncertainty between adolescents and adults found that adolescents show higher ambiguity tolerance and less clue search effort;and adolescents’ high ambiguity tolerance is considered to trigger adolescent drug abuse,rebelliousness and other bad behaviors(Tymula,et al.,2012;van den Bos&Hertwig,2017).However,due to limitations of experimental paradigms and research content,the reasons behind high ambiguity tolerance and poor clue search performance of adolescents are still unclear.Also,the relationship between ambiguity tolerance,clue search performance and adolescents’ positive behavior remains unknown.Therefore,this research attempts to construct a new experimental paradigm to explore influencing factors of adolescents’ ambiguity tolerance and clue search performance,and to further explore the effect mechanism.In addition,investigating the effect of ambiguity tolerance and clue search performance on adolescents’positive behavior from the perspective of academic performance is another important target.This research mainly consists of the following three parts:Study1 attempts to explore a new experimental paradigm for decision-making under uncertainty by combining existing experimental paradigms such as Iowa gambling task and Ellsberg ball selection task.Study2 aims to explore the effect of intelligence,risk preference,gain preference,peer pressure and reward incentive on ambiguity tolerance and clue search performance,and to further investigate the relationship between ambiguity tolerance and clue search performance.Study3 is targeted at the effect of risk preference,gain preference,ambiguity tolerance and clue search awareness on the academic performance of junior high school students.This study found that risk preference has a direct negative effect on clue search ability,while gain preference has a direct or indirect positive effect on ambiguity tolerance and clue search ability.Ambiguity tolerance has an indirect positive effect on clue search ability through the complete mediation of clue search awareness.Intelligence,peer pressure and reward incentive have no significant effect on ambiguity tolerance and clue search performance.Ambiguity tolerance and clue search awareness have a significant role in promoting academic performance of junior high school students.