Personal responsibility
Self-control forecasts better psychosocial outcomes but faster epigenetic aging in low-SES youth
Gregory Miller et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
There are persistent socioeconomic disparities in many aspects of child development in America. Relative to their affluent peers, children of low socioeconomic status (SES) complete fewer years of education, have a higher prevalence of health problems, and are convicted of more criminal offenses. Based on research indicating that low self-control underlies some of these disparities, policymakers have begun incorporating character-skills training into school curricula and social services. However, emerging data suggest that for low-SES youth, self-control may act as a "double-edged sword," facilitating academic success and psychosocial adjustment, while at the same time undermining physical health. Here, we examine this hypothesis in a five-wave study of 292 African American teenagers from rural Georgia. From ages 17 to 20 y, we assessed SES and self-control annually, along with depressive symptoms, substance use, aggressive behavior, and internalizing problems. At age 22 y, we obtained DNA methylation profiles of subjects' peripheral blood mononuclear cells. These data were used to measure epigenetic aging, a methylation-derived biomarker reflecting the disparity between biological and chronological aging. Among high-SES youth, better mid-adolescent self-control presaged favorable psychological and methylation outcomes. However, among low-SES youth, self-control had divergent associations with these outcomes. Self-control forecasted lower rates of depressive symptoms, substance use, aggressive behavior, and internalizing problems but faster epigenetic aging. These patterns suggest that for low-SES youth, resilience is a "skin-deep" phenomenon, wherein outward indicators of success can mask emerging problems with health. These findings have conceptual implications for models of resilience, and practical implications for interventions aimed at ameliorating social and racial disparities.
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Katherine Keyes et al.
Drug and Alcohol Dependence, forthcoming
Aims: Preference for risky activities is an important developmentally-graded predictor of substance use. Population-level trends in adolescent risk preference, as well as the way in which risk preference may be a conduit to risk behavior, have never been documented. The present study examines population-level trends in risk preference among U.S. high school seniors for the 36 years from1976-2011, as well as trends in the association between risk preference and substance use and other problem behaviors.
Methods: Data were drawn from yearly nationally-representative cross-sectional surveys of US high school seniors (N = 91,860). Risk preference was measured consistently with two items. Marijuana and cocaine use, binge drinking, and conduct problems were assessed. Trends were tested using JoinPoint software.
Results: The mean level of reported risk preference among US 12th graders has increased over time, especially in the 1980s. For example, the proportion of high school females who reported enjoying activities that were "a little dangerous" more than doubled, from 4.9% in 1976 to 10.8% in 1988. While risk preference reports among adolescent males leveled off in 1992, risk preference reports among females shows a continued positive overall slope through 2011. The magnitude of the association between risk preference and marijuana use has increased over time.
Conclusions: Reported preference for risky activities has increased among adolescents in the US, especially among young women. Reported risk preference is increasingly associated with a higher use of marijuana. Our findings argue for the importance of placing risk preference within a multi-level framework that attends to historical variation.
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Poverty and Economic Decision-Making: Evidence from Changes in Financial Resources at Payday
Leandro Carvalho, Stephan Meier & Stephanie Wang
American Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study the effect of financial resources on decision-making. Low-income U.S. households are randomly assigned to receive an online survey before or after payday. The survey collects measures of cognitive function and administers risk and intertemporal choice tasks. The study design generates variation in cash, checking and savings balances, and expenditures. Before-payday participants behave as if they are more present-biased when making intertemporal choices about monetary rewards but not when making intertemporal choices about non-monetary real-effort tasks. Nor do we find before-after differences in risk-taking, the quality of decision-making, the performance in cognitive function tasks, or in heuristic judgments.
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Anahi Collado et al.
Journal of Early Adolescence, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research indicates that White adolescents tend to engage in greater levels of risk behavior relative to Black adolescents. To better understand these differences, the current study examined real-time changes in risk-taking propensity (RTP). The study utilized the Balloon Analogue Risk Task-Youth Version (BART-Y), a well-validated real-time, laboratory assessment of RTP. The sample included 224 adolescents (41% Black; Mage = 11 +/- 0.8 years old). Generalized Equations Modeling analyses indicated that Black adolescents showed greater RTP decreases over the course of the task relative to White adolescents. Findings suggested that both groups exhibited similar RTP at the beginning of the BART-Y, and that significant differences emerged as the task progressed. The differences in RTP remained after controlling for family income, gender, age, and past-year risk behaviors. RTP may be an important target of investigation when examining racial differences in adolescent risk behavior.
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Not-So-Strong Evidence for Gender Differences in Risk Taking
Julie Nelson
Feminist Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Based on a growing body of experimental and other studies, two recent economics survey articles claim to find "strong evidence" that women are "fundamental[ly]" more risk-averse than men. Yet, much of the literature fails to clearly distinguish between differences that hold at the individual level (categorical differences between men and women) and patterns that appear only at the aggregate level (statistically detectable differences in men's and women's distributions, such as different means). There is a resulting problem of possible misinterpretation, as well as a dearth of appropriate attention to substantive significance. Additionally, one of the two surveys suffers from problems of statistical validity, possibly due to confirmation bias. Applying appropriate, expanded statistical techniques to the same data, this study finds substantial similarity and overlap between the distributions of men and women in risk taking, and a difference in means that is not substantively large.
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Sandra Black et al.
NBER Working Paper, July 2015
Abstract:
Risk-taking behavior is highly correlated between parents and their children; however, little is known about the extent to which these relationships are genetic or determined by environmental factors. We use data on stock market participation of Swedish adoptees and relate this to the investment behavior of both their biological and adoptive parents. We find that stock market participation of parents increases that of children by about 34% and that both pre-birth and post-birth factors are important. However, once we condition on having positive financial wealth, we find that nurture has a much stronger influence on risk-taking by children, and the evidence of a relationship between stock-holding of biological parents and their adoptive children becomes very weak. We find similar results when we study the share of financial wealth that is invested in stocks. This suggests that a substantial proportion of risk-attitudes and behavior is environmentally determined.
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Procrastination and Impatience
Ernesto Reuben, Paola Sapienza & Luigi Zingales
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, October 2015, Pages 63-76
Abstract:
We use a combination of lab and field evidence to study whether highly-impatient individuals are more likely to procrastinate. To measure impatience, we elicit individual discount rates by giving participants choices between smaller-sooner and larger-later rewards. To measure procrastination, we record how quickly participants complete three tasks: an online game, their application to the university, and a mandatory survey. We find that, consistent with the theory, impatient individuals procrastinate more, but only in tasks where there are costs to delay (the online game and university application). Since we pay participants by check, we are also able to determine whether the participants' cashing behavior is consistent with the timing of their payment choice. We find substantial evidence of time inconsistency. Namely, more than half of the participants who receive their check straight away instead of waiting two weeks for a reasonably larger amount, subsequently take more than two weeks to cash it.
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Suboptimal Foraging Behavior: A New Perspective on Gambling
Merideth Addicott et al.
Behavioral Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why do people gamble? Conventional views hold that gambling may be motivated by irrational beliefs, risk-seeking, impulsive temperament, or dysfunction within the same reward circuitry affected by drugs of abuse. An alternate, unexplored perspective is that gambling is an extension of natural foraging behavior to a financial environment. However, when these foraging algorithms are applied to stochastic gambling outcomes, undesirable results may occur. To test this hypothesis, we recruited participants based on their frequency of gambling - yearly (or less), monthly, and weekly - and investigated how gambling frequency related to irrational beliefs, risk-taking/impulsivity, and foraging behavior. We found that increased gambling frequency corresponded to greater gambling-related beliefs, more exploratory choices on an explore/exploit foraging task, and fewer points earned on a Patchy Foraging Task. Gambling-related beliefs negatively related to performance on the Patchy Foraging Task, indicating that individuals with more gambling-related cognitions tended to leave a patch too quickly. This indicates that frequent gamblers have reduced foraging ability to maximize rewards; however, gambling frequency - and by extension, poor foraging ability - was not related to risk-taking or impulsive behavior. These results suggest that gambling reflects the application of a dysfunctional foraging process to financial outcomes.
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Red Color and Risk-Taking Behavior in Online Environments
Timo Gnambs, Markus Appel & Aileen Oeberst
PLoS ONE, July 2015
Abstract:
In many situations red is associated with hazard and danger. As a consequence, it was expected that task-irrelevant color cues in online environments would affect risk-taking behaviors. This assumption was tested in two web-based experiments. The first study (N = 383) demonstrated that in risky choice dilemmas respondents preferred the less risky option when the displayed university logo was in red (versus gray); but only when both choice alternatives were at least moderately risky. The second study (N = 144) replicated these results with a behavioral outcome: Respondents showed more cautious behavior in a web-based game when the focal stimuli were colored red (versus blue). Together, these findings demonstrate that variations in the color design of a computerized environment affect risk taking: Red color leads to more conservative choices and behaviors.
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Molecular genetic underpinnings of self-control: 5-HTTLPR and self-control in a sample of inmates
Jessica Wells et al.
Journal of Criminal Justice, September-October 2015, Pages 386-396
Purpose: Several studies now show that self-control, as proposed by Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990), is at least moderately heritable. Studies of molecular genetic variation related to serotonergic function suggest that the heritability of self-control may be explained, in part, by the 5-HTTLPR polymorphism.
Methods: The current research tests the association between the 5-HTTLPR polymorphism and self-control as measured by the Grasmick et al. (1993) scale. Analyses were based on a sample of incarcerated males and considered the effect of the 5-HTTLPR polymorphism on the full self-control scale as well as the specific dimensions of self-control.
Results: The s/s genotype interacted with abuse to predict increases in overall self-control, preference for simple tasks and physical activity. Relative to the s/l genotype, the l/l genotype, which has been linked to psychopathy, was directly associated with more self-centeredness.
Conclusions: Results show that molecular genetic variation related to serotonergic function plays a role in the heritability of self-control. Variation in the association between 5-HTTLPR genotype and the distinct dimensions of self-control, while consistent with recent literature (see Yildirim & Derksen, 2013), indicates that self-control as originally presented by Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) is not a unitary construct.
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The Investment Decisions of Young Adults Under Relaxed Borrowing Constraints
Michael Insler, Pamela Schmitt & James Compton
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Students at the United States Naval Academy have the opportunity to take a Career Starter Loan (CSL). Two military-oriented banks offer these large personal loans at very low interest rates to all students. Thus the CSL provides a novel opportunity to study the behavior of a sample of borrowers that is not selected due to credit history and is often too liquidity-constrained to invest. Using survey data, this paper examines borrowers' investment and consumption decisions in relation to their cognitive ability (measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test, the SAT, and grade point average), personality traits (captured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), and other demographic characteristics. Tobit models reveal that: (1) cognitive ability is positively associated with more investment and riskier choices; (2) some MBTI personality traits are strong predictors of investment behavior; (3) individuals with prior investment experience or who view themselves as financially literate tend to invest more and with more risk; (4) these findings are largely consistent across students from all income levels.
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Chie Hanaoka, Hitoshi Shigeoka & Yasutora Watanabe
NBER Working Paper, July 2015
Abstract:
We investigate whether individuals' risk preferences change after experiencing a natural disaster- specifically, the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. The novelty of our study is that we use panels of nationally representative surveys, and thus, we can track the changes in risk preferences of the same individuals. We find that people who experienced greater intensity of the Earthquake become more risk tolerant. Interestingly, all the results are driven by men. Furthermore, these men gamble and drink more. Finally, we compare the estimates from cross-sectional and panel specifications, demonstrating that the cross-sectional estimate may be biased due to unobserved heterogeneity.
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Delayed Gratification: A Grey Parrot (Psittacus erithacus) Will Wait for a Better Reward
Adrienne Koepke, Suzanne Gray & Irene Pepperberg
Journal of Comparative Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Delay of gratification, the ability to forgo an immediate reward to gain either better quality or quantity, has been used as a metric for temporal discounting, self-control, and the ability to plan for the future in both humans (particularly children) and nonhumans. The task involved can be parsed in several ways, such that the subjects can be required to wait, not only for a better or a larger reward, but also such that the rewards can either be in view or hidden during the delay interval. We have demonstrated that a Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus) trained in the use of English speech could respond to the label "wait" for up to 15 min, in a task that has many similarities to those used with young children, to receive a better quality reward, whether or not the better quality reward or the experimenter was in view.
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Haunts or Helps from the Past: Understanding the Effect of Recall on Current Self-Control
Hristina Nikolova, Cait Lamberton & Kelly Haws
Journal of Consumer Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Conventional wisdom suggests that remembering our past successes or failures can help us make better decisions in the present. But how successful is this practice in the domain of self-control? Our work examines how the content of consumers' recollections (past self-control successes versus failures) and the subjective difficulty with which this content comes to mind (easily or with difficulty) jointly shape consumers' self-control decisions. When successes are easy to recall, people display more self-control than when they have difficulty recalling successes. However, recalling failures prompts indulgence regardless of its difficulty. We suggest that these differences in behavior may exist because recalling failures has substantially different affective and cognitive consequences than does recalling successes. Consistent with this theory, we demonstrate that external cues toward high or low self-certainty moderate the effects of recall on self-control. Taken together, this work enhances our understanding of self-control, self-perceptions, and metacognition.