Just do it
Sarah Helfinstein, Jeanette Mumford & Russell Poldrack
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is a large gap between the types of risky behavior we recommend to others and those we engage in ourselves. In this study, we hypothesized that a source of this gap is greater reliance on information about others’ behavior when deciding whether to take a risk oneself than when deciding whether to recommend it to others. To test this hypothesis, we asked participants either to report their willingness to engage in a series of risky behaviors themselves; their willingness to recommend those behaviors to a loved one; or, how good of an idea it would be for either them or a loved one to engage in the behaviors. We then asked them to evaluate those behaviors on criteria related to the expected utility of the risk (benefits, costs, and likelihood of costs), and on engagement in the activity by people they knew. We found that, after accounting for effects of perceived benefit, cost, and likelihood of cost, perceptions of others’ behavior had a dramatically larger impact on participants’ willingness to engage in a risk than on their willingness to recommend the risk or their prescriptive evaluation of the risk. These findings indicate that the influence of others’ choices on risk-taking behavior is large, direct, cannot be explained by an economic utility model of risky decision-making, and goes against one’s own better judgment.
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Adolescent Time Preferences Predict Lifetime Outcomes
Bart Golsteyn, Hans Grönqvist & Lena Lindahl
Economic Journal, November 2014, Pages F739–F761
Abstract:
This study investigates the relationship between time preferences and lifetime social and economic outcomes. We use a Swedish longitudinal data set that links information from a large survey on children's time preferences at age 13 to administrative registers spanning over five decades. Our results indicate a substantial adverse relationship between high discount rates and school performance, health, labour supply and lifetime income. Males and high-ability children gain significantly more from being future oriented. These discrepancies are largest regarding outcomes later in life. We also show that the relationship between time preferences and long-run outcomes operates through early human capital investments.
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Bill Thornton et al.
Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research consistently demonstrates the active use of cell phones, whether talking or texting, to be distracting and contributes to diminished performance when multitasking (e.g., distracted driving or walking). Recent research also has indicated that simply the presence of a cell phone and what it might represent (i.e., social connections, broader social network, etc.) can be similarly distracting and have negative consequences in a social interaction. Results of two studies reported here provide further evidence that the “mere presence” of a cell phone may be sufficiently distracting to produce diminished attention and deficits in task-performance, especially for tasks with greater attentional and cognitive demands. The implications for such an unintended negative consequence may be quite wide-ranging (e.g., productivity in school and the work place).
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Wen-Bin Chiou, Wen-Hsiung Wu & Ying-Yao Cheng
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Successful smoking cessation or reduction requires smokers to focus on the distal concerns of health and control instead of immediate impulses to smoke. Based on pioneering research demonstrating that cues inducing a mating mindset (i.e., viewing pictures of attractive women) can engender greater temporal discounting in men, we conducted a laboratory experiment to examine whether viewing faces of attractive women rendered male smokers with intentions to quit or reduce smoking more likely to discount the future and give in to the immediate impulse to smoke by sacrificing distal health concerns during a subsequent task. Seventy-six male smokers with intentions to quit or reduce smoking were randomly assigned to view either attractive or unattractive opposite-sex faces. Participants completed a modified Stroop task measuring their mating mindset after the attractiveness manipulation. The dependent variables were temporal discounting and actual cigarette consumption during an ostensible survey. A mating mindset mediated the connection between viewing pictures of attractive women and greater temporal discounting. Male smokers exposed to photographs of attractive compared with unattractive women were less likely to refrain from smoking and smoked more cigarettes in a subsequent survey. Attractive women may act as stimuli that increase a mating mindset among male smokers with intentions to quit or reduce smoking, leading to greater temporal discounting and reduced control over cigarette consumption. The implications for associations among mating motives, temporal discounting, and control over addictive impulses and behaviors are discussed.
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Patrick Egan, Joshua Clarkson & Edward Hirt
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present research explored the empirical relation between positive mood and self-control restoration. In line with recent work on the perceptual correlates of self-control exertion, we tested whether positive mood’s restorative effects could be partly attributable to expectancies of mental energy change. Results showed that positive mood elicited a general expectancy of mental energy restoration and that negative mood elicited a general expectancy of mental energy depletion. Furthermore, these expectancies were shown to alter perceptual and cognitive state in manners predictive of downstream self-control performance. Together, these results compliment emerging work on the importance of perceptual processes in the modulation of self-control performance, and warrant future work on the role of expectancies and subjective fatigue in self-regulatory pursuits.
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Eyes Wide Shopped: Shopping Situations Trigger Arousal in Impulsive Buyers
Benjamin Serfas, Oliver Büttner & Arnd Florack
PLoS ONE, December 2014
Abstract:
The present study proposes arousal as an important mechanism driving buying impulsiveness. We examined the effect of buying impulsiveness on arousal in non-shopping and shopping contexts. In an eye-tracking experiment, we measured pupil dilation while participants viewed and rated pictures of shopping scenes and non-shopping scenes. The results demonstrated that buying impulsiveness is closely associated with arousal as response to viewing pictures of shopping scenes. This pertained for hedonic shopping situations as well as for utilitarian shopping situations. Importantly, the effect did not emerge for non-shopping scenes. Furthermore, we demonstrated that arousal of impulsive buyers is independent from cognitive evaluation of scenes in the pictures.
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Driving Under the Influence of Risky Peers: An Experimental Study of Adolescent Risk Taking
Luna Muñoz Centifanti et al.
Journal of Research on Adolescence, forthcoming
Abstract:
Both passive and active social influences may affect adolescents' dangerous driving. In this study, we used an experimental paradigm to delineate these two influences with actual peers. Adolescents completed a simulated driving task, and we measured risk preferences of each member of the peer group. We used hierarchical linear modeling to partition variance in risky decisions. Adolescents experienced many more crashes when they had “passengers” present who reported a strong preference for risk taking and who actively provided decision-making guidance. Although youth in the passive peer condition were also influenced by the riskiness of their peers, this relation was less strong relative to the active condition. We discuss the need for interventions focusing on active and passive peer influence.
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Is it random or impulsive responding? The effect of working memory load on decision-making
Maegan Hatfield-Eldred, Reid Skeel & Mark Reilly
Journal of Cognitive Psychology, Winter 2015, Pages 27-36
Abstract:
Research has suggested individuals with limited working memory (WM) capacity make more impulsive choices than individuals without such limited capacity; however, the specificity of increased impulsivity has been challenged on the grounds that limited WM may lead to an increase in random responding rather than a true increase in impulsivity. Furthermore, whereas some previous research have demonstrated sex differences in decision-making, with males tending to make a higher proportion of impulsive decisions than females, the overall results in this area have been mixed. Thus, the current study specifically controlled for the impact of sex, a potential key issue within this area. In this study, 120 subjects (60 males) were randomly assigned to a WM load or control group and completed a decision-making task requiring rapid decisions. The task utilised three probability of loss conditions. The main findings centred on an interaction between sex and WM load, with males showing increased impulsive decision-making in WM load conditions, whereas females did not show a change in decision-making patterns under WM load. Results of this study support the claim that decreased WM capacity increases impulsive decision-making rather than random responding in men, whereas WM load was unrelated to risk-taking in women.
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Credit scores, cardiovascular disease risk, and human capital
Salomon Israel et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2 December 2014, Pages 17087–17092
Abstract:
Credit scores are the most widely used instruments to assess whether or not a person is a financial risk. Credit scoring has been so successful that it has expanded beyond lending and into our everyday lives, even to inform how insurers evaluate our health. The pervasive application of credit scoring has outpaced knowledge about why credit scores are such useful indicators of individual behavior. Here we test if the same factors that lead to poor credit scores also lead to poor health. Following the Dunedin (New Zealand) Longitudinal Study cohort of 1,037 study members, we examined the association between credit scores and cardiovascular disease risk and the underlying factors that account for this association. We find that credit scores are negatively correlated with cardiovascular disease risk. Variation in household income was not sufficient to account for this association. Rather, individual differences in human capital factors — educational attainment, cognitive ability, and self-control — predicted both credit scores and cardiovascular disease risk and accounted for ∼45% of the correlation between credit scores and cardiovascular disease risk. Tracing human capital factors back to their childhood antecedents revealed that the characteristic attitudes, behaviors, and competencies children develop in their first decade of life account for a significant portion (∼22%) of the link between credit scores and cardiovascular disease risk at midlife. We discuss the implications of these findings for policy debates about data privacy, financial literacy, and early childhood interventions.
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Perils of Compensatory Consumption: Within-Domain Compensation Undermines Subsequent Self-Regulation
Monika Lisjak et al.
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior research has shown that psychological threat can provoke consumers to desire, seek out, and acquire products that symbolize accomplishment in the domain of the threat. Although such within-domain compensation can serve as a psychological salve to repair the self, the current research suggests that sometimes this form of compensation can have ill effects. Specifically, engaging in within-domain compensation can trigger ruminative thinking about the threat. As a consequence, performance in subsequent tasks that require self-regulation is undermined. In support of this hypothesis, multiple experiments demonstrate that within-domain compensation impairs subsequent self-regulation on behaviors ranging from resisting tempting but unhealthy food to performing cognitively taxing tasks. Evidence that within-domain compensation fosters ruminative thought, as well as documentation of boundary conditions, is provided.
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Yaron Levi
University of California Working Paper, November 2014
Abstract:
In a randomized field experiment, I show that information architecture significantly affects individuals' spending and savings behavior. I present users of a large online account aggregation provider with a personalized financial index. This index represents the inflation-protected, lifetime monthly cash flow that they can obtain, given their personal financial and demographic information and current market prices. Users receiving this information tool reduce their spending by 10.7% relative to a control group. This effect is sensitive to the description of the index using a consumption frame rather than an investment frame and to the presentation of an explicit comparison between the index and historical spending levels. Further, spending reductions are primarily in large, infrequent transactions. This experiment is the first to directly affect overall spending behavior and to demonstrate the importance of information architecture in that context. It demonstrates the potential of low cost digital information tools to impact financial behavior on a large scale.
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Suzannah Helps et al.
PLoS ONE, November 2014
Objectives: Noise often has detrimental effects on performance. However, because of the phenomenon of stochastic resonance (SR), auditory white noise (WN) can alter the “signal to noise” ratio and improve performance. The Moderate Brain Arousal (MBA) model postulates different levels of internal “neural noise” in individuals with different attentional capacities. This in turn determines the particular WN level most beneficial in each individual case – with one level of WN facilitating poor attenders but hindering super-attentive children. The objective of the present study is to find out if added WN affects cognitive performance differently in children that differ in attention ability.
Methods: Participants were teacher-rated super- (N = 25); normal- (N = 29) and sub-attentive (N = 36) children (aged 8 to 10 years). Two non-executive function (EF) tasks (a verbal episodic recall task and a delayed verbal recognition task) and two EF tasks (a visuo-spatial working memory test and a Go-NoGo task) were performed under three WN levels. The non-WN condition was only used to control for potential differences in background noise in the group testing situations.
Results: There were different effects of WN on performance in the three groups -- adding moderate WN worsened the performance of super-attentive children for both task types and improved EF performance in sub-attentive children. The normal-attentive children’s performance was unaffected by WN exposure. The shift from moderate to high levels of WN had little further effect on performance in any group.
Significance: The predicted differential effect of WN on performance was confirmed. However, the failure to find evidence for an inverted U function challenges current theories. Alternative explanations are discussed. We propose that WN therapy should be further investigated as a possible non-pharmacological treatment for inattention.
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Edward Selby et al.
Journal of Personality, forthcoming
Background: Influenced by chaos theory, the Emotional Cascade Model proposes that rumination and negative emotion may promote each other in a self-amplifying cycle that increases over time. Accordingly, exponential-compounding effects may better describe the relationship between rumination and negative emotion when they occur in impulsive persons, and predict impulsive behavior.
Methods: Participants who reported frequent engagement in impulsive behaviors monitored their ruminative thoughts and negative emotion multiple times daily for two weeks using digital recording devices. Hypotheses were tested using cross-lagged mixed model analyses.
Results: Findings indicated that rumination predicted subsequent elevations in rumination that lasted over extended periods of time. Rumination and negative emotion predicted increased levels of each other at subsequent assessments, and exponential functions for these associations were supported. Results also supported a synergistic effect between rumination and negative emotion, predicting larger elevations in subsequent rumination and negative emotion than when one variable alone was elevated. Finally, there were synergistic effects of rumination and negative emotion in predicting number of impulsive behaviors subsequently reported.
Conclusions: These findings are consistent with the Emotional Cascade Model in suggesting that momentary rumination and negative emotion progressively propagate and magnify each other over time in impulsive people, promoting impulsive behavior.