Verbal uncertainty expressions: A critical review of two decades of research
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Although individuals have internally consistent interpretation of words for describing probabilities, these interpretations can vary substantially from one person to another.
“Many studies have shown that although individuals have internally consistent interpretation of words for describing probabilities (e.g., likely, probably), these interpretations can vary substantially from one person to another [17,22,74].”
From Uncertainty as a Form of Transparency: Measuring, Communicating, and Using Uncertainty (2021) · cites this paper as [22]
Cites
“How Probable is Probable? A Numerical Translation of Verbal Probability Expressions.”
Beyth‐Marom, R. (1982) · Journal of Forecasting · doi:10.1002/for.3980010305 · Cited by 527 · see citing works
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Communicating uncertainty about facts, numbers and science
van der Bles, A. M., van der Linden, S., Freeman, A. L. J., Mitchell, J., Galvao, A. B., Zaval, L., & Spiegelhalter, D. J. (2019) · Royal Society Open Science · doi:10.1098/rsos.181870 · Cited by 456 · see citing works
The effects of communicating uncertainty on public trust in facts and numbers
van der Bles, A. M., van der Linden, S., Freeman, A. L. J., & Spiegelhalter, D. J. (2020) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1913678117 · Cited by 348 · see citing works
Measuring psychological uncertainty: Verbal versus numeric methods.
Windschitl, P. D., & Wells, G. L. (1996) · Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied · doi:10.1037/1076-898x.2.4.343 · Cited by 326 · see citing works
Uncertainty as a Form of Transparency: Measuring, Communicating, and Using Uncertainty
Bhatt, U., Antorán, J., Zhang, Y., Liao, Q. V., Sattigeri, P., Fogliato, R., Melançon, G., Krishnan, R., Stanley, J., Tickoo, O., et al. (2021) · Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society · doi:10.1145/3461702.3462571 · Cited by 225 · see citing works
Kim, S. S. Y., Liao, Q. V., Vorvoreanu, M., Ballard, S., & Vaughan, J. W. (2024) · The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness Accountability and Transparency · doi:10.1145/3630106.3658941 · Cited by 147 · see citing works
“Different forms of natural language uncertainty expression have been studied by researchers in disciplines ranging from psychology [30, 95, 101] and human-computer interaction [5, 37, 89] to communication [59] and marketing [36, 72].”
BackgroundSeeing What You Want to See: How Imprecise Uncertainty Ranges Enhance Motivated Reasoning
Dieckmann, N. F., Gregory, R., Peters, E., & Hartman, R. (2017) · Risk Analysis · doi:10.1111/risa.12639 · Cited by 84 · see citing works
Interpersonal comparison of subjective probabilities: Toward translating linguistic probabilities
Dhami, M. K., & Wallsten, T. S. (2005) · Memory & Cognition · doi:10.3758/bf03193213 · Cited by 75 · see citing works
Verbal Expressions of Confidence and Doubt
Wesson, C. J., & Pulford, B. D. (2009) · Psychological Reports · doi:10.2466/pr0.105.1.151-160 · Cited by 31 · see citing works
Zhang, C., Zhu, S., Yang, X., Tseng, Y.-C., Jiang, S., & Rzeszotarski, J. M. (2025) · Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces · doi:10.1145/3719160.3736618 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
- Authors
- Clark, D. A.
- Corresponding author
- Clark, Dominic A.
- ORCID
- Clark, Dominic A.
- Venue
- Current Psychology
- Published
- 1990-09
- Volume
- 9
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 203-235
- ISSN
- 1046-1310 (ISSN-L)
- 0737-8262
- 1936-4733
- OpenAlex
- W1990302162
- Cited by
- 112
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 40 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 2 · 2014: 6 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 5
- FWCI
- 1.47
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Current Psychology (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Categorization, perception, and language
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Keywords
- uncertainty communication, internal consistency, between-subject variability, expert systems, epistemology of uncertainty
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