Acting on impulse
Sex, drugs, and ADHD: The effects of ADHD pharmacological treatment on teens' risky behaviors
Anna Chorniy & Leah Kitashima
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the U.S., 8% of children are diagnosed with ADHD and 70% of those are taking medications, yet little evidence exists on the effects of ADHD treatment on children's outcomes. We use a panel of South Carolina Medicaid claims data to investigate the effects of ADHD drugs on the probability of risky sexual behavior outcomes (STDs and pregnancy), substance abuse disorders, and injuries. To overcome potential endogeneity, we instrument for treatment using physicians' preferences to prescribe medication. Our findings suggest that pharmacological treatment has substantial benefits. It reduces the probability of contracting an STD by 3.6 percentage points (5.8 percentage points if we include STD screening), reduces the probability of having a substance abuse disorder by 7.3 percentage points, reduces the probability of injuries by 2.3 percentage points per year, and associated with them Medicaid costs decrease by $88.4, or 0.054 of a standard deviation.
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Can't wait to celebrate: Holiday euphoria, impulsive behavior and time preference
Eyal Lahav, Tal Shavit & Uri Benzion
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The pre-holiday effect is a well-documented phenomenon, especially for financial markets. The behavioral explanation for the pre-holiday effect is called "holiday euphoria." In the current paper, we examine how the holiday period influences the time preference of students, by comparing their subjective discount rate before and after the Passover holiday in Israel. Although there is considerable research on the pre-holiday effect and its influence on investors in the capital market, we are unaware of any prior research on the influence of the pre-holiday effect on time preference. Our results suggest that holiday euphoria induces impulsive behavior, making people more present-oriented (having a higher subjective discount rate) before the holiday. We also show how holiday euphoria affects people's immediate mood (feeling down in the present), and how it is affected by their level of pessimism.
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Rebecca Ferrer et al.
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
That anger elicited in one situation can carry over to drive risky behavior in another situation has been described since the days of Aristotle. The present studies examine the mechanisms through which and the conditions under which such behavior occurs. Across three experiments, as well as a meta-analytic synthesis of the data, results reveal that incidental anger is significantly more likely to drive risky decision making among males than among females. Moreover, the experiments document that, under certain circumstances, such risk-taking pays off financially. Indeed, the present experiments demonstrate that, because the expected-value-maximizing strategy in these studies rewarded risk-taking, angry-male individuals earned more money than did both neutral-emotion males and angry females. In sum, these studies found evidence for robust disparities between males and females for anger-driven risk-taking. Importantly, although men did not experience more anger than women, they did show a heightened tendency to respond to anger with risk-taking.
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Becoming Stranger: When Future Selves Join the Out-Group
Bethany Burum, Daniel Gilbert & Timothy Wilson
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
One of the most powerful rules of interpersonal behavior is that people are kinder to members of their in-groups than to members of their out-groups. Are people also kinder to their future selves when they expect them to remain members of their current in-groups rather than become members of their current out-groups? In 2 studies, participants in an emotionally charged debate expected either to remain on the same team or to join the opposing team when they returned the following week. Those who expected to join the opposing team were less willing to sacrifice for their future selves, leaving more of an unpleasant task for their future selves to finish and treating their future selves as unkindly as they treated a stranger. These results suggest that the rules that govern interpersonal behavior may also govern intertemporal behavior, and suggest new strategies to encourage prudent decisions.
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Does Self-Control Improve With Practice? Evidence From a Six-Week Training Program
Eleanor Miles et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Can self-control be improved through practice? Several studies have found that repeated practice of tasks involving self-control improves performance on other tasks relevant to self-control. However, in many of these studies, improvements after training could be attributable to methodological factors (e.g., passive control conditions). Moreover, the extent to which the effects of training transfer to real-life settings is not yet clear. In the present research, participants (N = 174) completed a 6-week training program of either cognitive or behavioral self-control tasks. We then tested the effects of practice on a range of measures of self-control, including lab-based and real-world tasks. Training was compared with both active and no-contact control conditions. Despite high levels of adherence to the training tasks, there was no effect of training on any measure of self-control. Trained participants did not, for example, show reduced ego depletion effects, become better at overcoming their habits, or report exerting more self-control in everyday life. Moderation analyses found no evidence that training was effective only among particular groups of participants. Bayesian analyses suggested that the data were more consistent with a null effect of training on self-control than with previous estimates of the effect of practice. The implication is that training self-control through repeated practice does not result in generalized improvements in self-control.
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Fake feedback on pain tolerance impacts proactive versus reactive control strategies
Davide Rigoni et al.
Consciousness and Cognition, May 2016, Pages 366-373
Abstract:
It is well-known that beliefs about one's own ability to execute a task influence task performance. Here, we tested the hypothesis that beliefs about a specific self-control capacity, namely pain tolerance, modulate basic cognitive control processes. Participants received fake comparative social feedback that their ability to tolerate painful stimulations was either very poor or outstanding after which they performed an unrelated go/no-go task. Participants receiving low-tolerance feedback, relative to high-tolerance feedback, were less successful at inhibiting their responses and more influenced by previous trial conditions, as indicated by an increased slowdown following errors and more failed inhibitions following go-trials. These observations demonstrate a shift from a more proactive to a more reactive control mode. This study shows that providing feedback about one's own capacity to control impulsive reactions to painful stimulations directly influences low-level cognitive control dynamics.
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Buying to Blunt Negative Feelings: Materialistic Escape From the Self
Grant Donnelly et al.
Review of General Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We propose that escape theory, which describes how individuals seek to free themselves from aversive states of self-awareness, helps explain key patterns of materialistic people's behavior. As predicted by escape theory, materialistic individuals may feel dissatisfied with their standard of living, cope with failed expectations and life stressors less effectively than others, suffer from aversive self-awareness, and experience negative emotions as a result. To cope with negative, self-directed emotions, materialistic people may enter a narrow, cognitively deconstructed mindset in order to temporarily blunt the capacity for self-reflection. Cognitive narrowing decreases inhibitions thereby engendering impulsivity, passivity, irrational thought, and disinhibited behaviors, including maladaptive consumption.