Daredevil
Gillian Pepper & Daniel Nettle
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Evolutionarily-based theories predict that people should adopt a faster life history strategy when their mortality risk is high. However, this raises the question of what cues evolved psychological mechanisms rely on when forming their estimates of personal mortality risk. In a sample of 600 North Americans, we examined associations between ideal or actual reproductive timing and two possible cues to mortality risk: 1) the total number of people a person knew who had died (death exposure); and 2) the number of those people to whom they felt close (bereavement). We also took a measure of financial future discounting, in order to establish whether experiences of death or bereavement are associated with a more general shortening of time horizons. We found that a greater number of bereavements were robustly associated with a lower ideal age at first birth, or an increased hazard of an actual first birth at any given age and with steeper future discounting. We did not find significant associations between any of these outcomes and overall death exposure. This suggests that the deaths of people with whom one is close may be a more salient cue for the calibration of reproductive and financial time horizons than the deaths of more distant acquaintances.
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Daniella Kupor, Wendy Liu & On Amir
Stanford University Working Paper, September 2013
Abstract:
Interruptions to consumer decision making are ubiquitous. Across three studies, we find that interruptions in decision making can increase risk-taking. When an individual is interrupted during a risky decision, we find that his/her previous consideration of the decision causes it to feel more familiar. This interruption-induced familiarity increases risk-taking by decreasing avoidance motivation, as well as by increasing the perceived likelihood of a successful outcome. These findings have important implications for understanding how risk preferences may be powerfully influenced by the dynamic - and often interrupted - course of decision making.
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Situational Materialism: How Entering Lotteries May Undermine Self-Control
Hyeongmin (Christian) Kim
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although materialism is linked to self-control failure, the underlying process remains unclear. By manipulating materialistic thoughts via state-sponsored lotteries, this research examines why materialism may undermine self-control. Across four studies, this research demonstrates that entering a lottery tends to activate materialistic thoughts and that these thoughts generally constitute low-level construal, which, in turn, results in self-control failure. This effect is moderated by the degree to which people are oriented toward extrinsic values. In addition, when materialistic thoughts are diverted, entering a lottery has no effect on self-control. In summary, this research highlights that materialism, although stable and enduring, can manifest itself in a burst of materialistic thoughts. The research provides important implications for research on materialism, self-control, and mental construal.
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Theresa Teslovich et al.
Developmental Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Adolescent decision-making has been described as impulsive and suboptimal in the presence of incentives. In this study we examined the neural substrates of adolescent decision-making using a perceptual discrimination task for which small and large rewards were associated with correctly detecting the direction of motion of a cloud of moving dots. Adults showed a reward bias of faster reaction times on trials for which the direction of motion was associated with a large reward. Adolescents, in contrast, were slower to make decisions on trials associated with large rewards. This behavioral pattern in adolescents was paralleled by greater recruitment of fronto-parietal regions important in representing the accumulation of evidence sufficient for selecting one choice over its alternative and the certainty of that choice. The findings suggest that when large incentives are dependent on performance, adolescents may require more evidence to accumulate prior to responding, to be certain to maximize their gains. Adults, in contrast, appear to be quicker in evaluating the evidence for a decision when primed by rewards. Overall these findings suggest that rather than reacting hastily, adolescents can be incentivized to take more time to make decisions when large rewards are at stake.
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Risk tolerance and entrepreneurship
Hans Hvide & Georgios Panos
Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
A theoretical tradition argues that more risk tolerant individuals are more likely to become entrepreneurs but perform worse. We test and confirm these predictions with several risk tolerance proxies. Using investment data for 400,000 individuals, we find that common stock investors are around 50% more likely to subsequently start up a firm. Firms started up by common stock investors have about 25% lower sales and 15% lower return on assets. The results are similar using personal leverage and other risk-tolerance proxies. We do not find support for alternative explanations such as unobserved wealth or other behavioral effects.
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Smart and Illicit: Who Becomes an Entrepreneur and Does it Pay?
Ross Levine & Yona Rubinstein
NBER Working Paper, August 2013
Abstract:
We disaggregate the self-employed into incorporated and unincorporated to distinguish between "entrepreneurs" and other business owners. The incorporated self-employed have a distinct combination of cognitive, noncognitive, and family traits. Besides coming from higher-income families with better-educated mothers, the incorporated - as teenagers - scored higher on learning aptitude tests, had greater self-esteem, and engaged in more aggressive, illicit, risk-taking activities. The combination of "smarts" and "aggressive/illicit/risk-taking" tendencies as a youth accounts for both entry into entrepreneurship and the comparative earnings of entrepreneurs. In contrast to a large literature, we also find that entrepreneurs earn much more per hour than their salaried counterparts.
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Still cautious: Personality characteristics of extremely low birth weight adults in their early 30s
Jordana Waxman et al.
Personality and Individual Differences, November 2013, Pages 967-971
Abstract:
Extremely low birth weight survivors (ELBW; <1000 g) display a personality style characterized by cautiousness, shyness, and risk aversion in their 20s. We examined whether non-impaired ELBW survivors were still more cautious than their normal birth weight (NBW) peers at ages 30-35 and assessed the stability of this personality characteristic across approximately a decade in the oldest known cohort of ELBW survivors. Of the 154 participants tested at ages 22-26, 111 (i.e., 72%) of them returned approximately 10 years later [i.e., 69% (49/71) ELBW and 75% (62/83) NBW], and once again they completed the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised (EPQ-R). We created the same theoretically and empirically derived composite measure of cautiousness at each visit by summing the EPQ-R psychoticism scale (reverse scored) and the EPQ-R lie scale. We found that ELBW adults reported higher cautiousness than their NBW counterparts at ages 30-35. We also found that levels of cautiousness remained stable over approximately 10 years in both groups. Our findings suggest that individuals born at ELBW were more cautious than NBW peers and that this personality characteristic remained stable into their early 30s. The present study appears to be the first empirical demonstration of personality stability among adult ELBW survivors.
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Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Enhances Cognitive Control During Emotion Regulation
Melanie Feeser et al.
Brain Stimulation, forthcoming
Background: The ability to cognitively control emotions is critical for mental health. Previous studies have identified the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) as a core region in cognitive reappraisal. However, there is only scarce evidence whether directly modulating dlPFC activity results in improved capacities for cognitive reappraisal.
Objective: In this study, we used anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the right dlPFC to investigate the effects of increased dlPFC excitability on cognitive reappraisal as indexed by subjective emotional arousal ratings and skin conductance responses.
Methods: The study was designed as a double-blind, between-subjects, sham-controlled trial. Half of the healthy participants were randomly assigned to receive either active tDCS (n = 21, 1.5 mA for 20 min over the right dlPFC) or sham stimulation (n = 21). Participants viewed negative and neutral pictures from the International Affective Picture System while they were instructed to either downregulate, upregulate or maintain their emotions. After each picture presentation, participants rated the intensity of emotional arousal. Skin conductance responses and gaze fixation were assessed.
Results: Our results revealed that anodal prefrontal tDCS during downregulation resulted in decreased skin conductance responses and decreased emotional arousal ratings. The opposite pattern was observed for the upregulation condition in which anodal tDCS resulted in higher arousal ratings accompanied by marginally enhanced skin conductance responses.
Conclusion: Our data indicates that tDCS facilitates cognitive reappraisal in both directions by either increasing or decreasing emotional responsiveness depending on the regulatory goal. This provides further evidence for the potential use of tDCS as a tool to modulate cognitive reappraisal. However, given the limitations of the present study, our findings need to be replicated and complimented by further studies.
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Video game training enhances cognitive control in older adults
J.A. Anguera et al.
Nature, 5 September 2013, Pages 97-101
Abstract:
Cognitive control is defined by a set of neural processes that allow us to interact with our complex environment in a goal-directed manner. Humans regularly challenge these control processes when attempting to simultaneously accomplish multiple goals (multitasking), generating interference as the result of fundamental information processing limitations. It is clear that multitasking behaviour has become ubiquitous in today's technologically dense world, and substantial evidence has accrued regarding multitasking difficulties and cognitive control deficits in our ageing population. Here we show that multitasking performance, as assessed with a custom-designed three-dimensional video game (NeuroRacer), exhibits a linear age-related decline from 20 to 79 years of age. By playing an adaptive version of NeuroRacer in multitasking training mode, older adults (60 to 85 years old) reduced multitasking costs compared to both an active control group and a no-contact control group, attaining levels beyond those achieved by untrained 20-year-old participants, with gains persisting for 6 months. Furthermore, age-related deficits in neural signatures of cognitive control, as measured with electroencephalography, were remediated by multitasking training (enhanced midline frontal theta power and frontal-posterior theta coherence). Critically, this training resulted in performance benefits that extended to untrained cognitive control abilities (enhanced sustained attention and working memory), with an increase in midline frontal theta power predicting the training-induced boost in sustained attention and preservation of multitasking improvement 6 months later. These findings highlight the robust plasticity of the prefrontal cognitive control system in the ageing brain, and provide the first evidence, to our knowledge, of how a custom-designed video game can be used to assess cognitive abilities across the lifespan, evaluate underlying neural mechanisms, and serve as a powerful tool for cognitive enhancement.
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What would my avatar do? Gaming, pathology, and risky decision making
Kira Bailey, Robert West & Judson Kuffel
Frontiers in Psychology, September 2013
Abstract:
Recent work has revealed a relationship between pathological video game use and increased impulsivity among children and adolescents. A few studies have also demonstrated increased risk-taking outside of the video game environment following game play, but this work has largely focused on one genre of video games (i.e., racing). Motivated by these findings, the aim of the current study was to examine the relationship between pathological and non-pathological video game use, impulsivity, and risky decision making. The current study also investigated the relationship between experience with two of the most popular genres of video games [i.e., first-person shooter (FPS) and strategy] and risky decision making. Consistent with previous work, ~7% of the current sample of college-aged adults met criteria for pathological video game use. The number of hours spent gaming per week was associated with increased impulsivity on a self-report measure and on the temporal discounting (TD) task. This relationship was sensitive to the genre of video game; specifically, experience with FPS games was positively correlated with impulsivity, while experience with strategy games was negatively correlated with impulsivity. Hours per week and pathological symptoms predicted greater risk-taking in the risk task and the Iowa Gambling task, accompanied by worse overall performance, indicating that even when risky choices did not pay off, individuals who spent more time gaming and endorsed more symptoms of pathological gaming continued to make these choices. Based on these data, we suggest that the presence of pathological symptoms and the genre of video game (e.g., FPS, strategy) may be important factors in determining how the amount of game experience relates to impulsivity and risky-decision making.
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Thirst-dependent risk preferences in monkeys identify a primitive form of wealth
Hiroshi Yamada et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 September 2013, Pages 15788-15793
Abstract:
Experimental economic techniques have been widely used to evaluate human risk attitudes, but how these measured attitudes relate to overall individual wealth levels is unclear. Previous noneconomic work has addressed this uncertainty in animals by asking the following: (i) Do our close evolutionary relatives share both our risk attitudes and our degree of economic rationality? And (ii) how does the amount of food or water one holds (a nonpecuniary form of "wealth") alter risk attitudes in these choosers? Unfortunately, existing noneconomic studies have provided conflicting insights from an economic point of view. We therefore used standard techniques from human experimental economics to measure monkey risk attitudes for water rewards as a function of blood osmolality (an objective measure of how much water the subjects possess). Early in training, monkeys behaved randomly, consistently violating first-order stochastic dominance and monotonicity. After training, they behaved like human choosers - technically consistent in their choices and weakly risk averse (i.e., risk averse or risk neutral on average) - suggesting that well-trained monkeys can serve as a model for human choice behavior. As with attitudes about money in humans, these risk attitudes were strongly wealth dependent; as the animals became "poorer," risk aversion increased, a finding incompatible with some models of wealth and risk in human decision making.
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Peter Fischer, Stephen Lea & Kath Evans
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why do so many people all over the world, so often, react to completely worthless scam offers? In two questionnaire studies, one of which included the distribution of an experimentally manipulated simulated scam, we investigated differences between respondents who did and did not report past compliance with scams. We found that the principal differences were in their response to very high-value incentives, in the extent to which they reacted with positive emotions to the thought of winning a large prize, in their reliance on signs of official authority, and in their self-confidence. The first two of these can be regarded as forms of visceral processing. Some of these differences suggested a dispositional difference between victims and non-victims.