Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Risk and uncertainty are inherent in life, and how people perceive, respond to, and manage both are topics of great aca-demic interest. One critical insight is that people distinguish between types of uncertainty (see, e.g., Fox & lkmen, 2011)and, consequently, may respond to objectively equally probabilistic events differently (e.g., with more polarized predic-tions of those events outcomes). The current work identifies another way in which risk (a specific form of uncertainty)is differentiated: on the basis of causal depth (Sloman, Love, & Ahn, 1998). Specifically, in contexts where an uncertainoutcome (e.g., win/lose) is determined by a causal chain, people tend to prefer for the uncertainty to arise at lower causaldepth within the chain (i.e., at later causal stages). This occurs even though the causal depth at which the uncertainty arisesmakes no difference in the overall probability that the causal chain will generate one outcome or another.