The Psychology of Conflictive Uncertainty

In the literature on multi-view learning techniques, “view disagreement” is listed as among the major challenges for multi-view representation learning. View disagreement is distinct from nonshared features in alternative views, because it gives rise to a type of uncertainty that humans find especially aversive, i.e., “conflictive uncertainty”. This chapter presents an overview of the psychological effects of conflictive uncertainty, and then provides some guidance for resolving and communicating about conflictive uncertainty that may avoid its problematic impacts on decision making and source credibility. Implications are discussed for developing explainable multi-view methods in the face of view disagreement.