Reckless
Risk Attitudes and Political Participation
Cindy Kam
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article contributes to existing explanations of political participation by proposing that citizens' attitudes towards risk predict participation. I argue that people who are risk accepting participate in political life because politics offers novelty and excitement. Analyses of two independent Internet surveys establish a positive, significant relationship between risk attitudes and general political participation. The analyses also suggest that the relationship between risk attitudes and action varies with the political act: people who are more risk accepting are more likely to participate in general political acts, but they are no more or less likely to turn out in elections. Further analyses suggest that two key mechanisms - novelty seeking and excitement seeking - underlie the relationship between risk attitudes and political participation.
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Personality and Behavioral Outcomes Associated with Risk-Taking are Accurately Inferred from Faces
Sandeep Mishra & Rajees Sritharan
Journal of Research in Personality, forthcoming
Abstract:
Growing evidence suggests that people are able to accurately infer, on average, personality traits and behavioral outcomes from facial photographs. However, little research has examined whether people are able to accurately infer personality traits or behavioral outcomes associated with risk-taking. In this study, we examined whether people were able to accurately infer, on average, personality traits associated with risk-taking from facial photographs. We further examined whether such first impressions were associated with relevant and important behavioral outcomes - specifically, future discounting and gambling and problem gambling tendencies. Results suggest that people are able to accurately infer, on average, personality traits and behavioral outcomes associated with risk-taking from faces.
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Sex differences in how erotic and painful stimuli impair inhibitory control
Jiaxin Yu et al.
Cognition, August 2012, Pages 251-255
Abstract:
Witnessing emotional events such as arousal or pain may impair ongoing cognitive processes such as inhibitory control. We found that this may be true only half of the time. Erotic images and painful video clips were shown to men and women shortly before a stop signal task, which measures cognitive inhibitory control. These stimuli impaired inhibitory control only in men and not in women, suggesting that emotional stimuli may be processed with different weights depending on gender.
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Dispositional Anxiety Blocks the Psychological Effects of Power
Jon Maner et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
A growing body of research demonstrates that power promotes a fundamental orientation toward approach and agency. The current studies suggest that this tendency is moderated by dispositional anxiety. In two experiments, high levels of dispositional anxiety blocked the psychological effects of power. Although people low in anxiety responded to a power prime with greater willingness to take risks, those high in anxiety did not (Experiment 1). Similarly, whereas those low in social anxiety responded to power with increased sexual attraction toward a confederate, individuals high in social anxiety failed to show the same effect (Experiment 2). In both studies, the interaction between power and anxiety was statistically mediated by perceptions of reward. Although power enhanced people's perceptions of reward, this effect was eliminated by high levels of dispositional anxiety. This research provides insight into how, and in whom, power promotes approach and agentic behavior.
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Acute Effects of Competitive Exercise on Risk-Taking In A Sample of Adolescent Male Athletes
Anne Black, Edward Hochman & Marc Rosen
Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Exercise acutely reduces cravings for tobacco and alcohol, but the mechanism accounting for this relationship is not fully understood. To explore exercise's effects on general risk-taking, we compared the performances of twenty adolescent male athletes on the balloon analog risk task (BART) immediately after periods of exercise (playing tennis) and rest. Statistically significant risk-taking effects were observed post-exercise. The established attenuating effect of exercise on desire for substance use did not extend to impulses for other risk behaviors in this study. In future studies, the moderating effects of participant characteristics and type of risk behavior should be considered.
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Low Self-Control and the Religiosity-Crime Relationship
Michael Reisig, Scott Wolfe & Travis Pratt
Criminal Justice and Behavior, September 2012, Pages 1172-1191
Abstract:
Two arguments have been advanced regarding the effect of low self-control on the religiosity-crime relationship. The first holds that self-control explains both religiosity and criminal offending (the confounding hypothesis), whereas the second posits that religiosity promotes self-control and indirectly affects antisocial behavior (the mediation hypothesis). Both hypotheses predict that the observed effect of religiosity on criminal offending is a spurious result of individual variations in self-control. With cross-sectional survey data from a university-based sample of 769 adult participants, the regression models indicate that the effect of religiosity on self-reported criminal offending is no different from zero after controlling for low self-control. This finding is observed when different religiosity measures are used. Religiosity did, however, predict minor crimes characterized by personal indulgence (i.e., ascetic offenses) independent of low self-control.
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Space, Time, and Intertemporal Preferences
Kyu Kim, Gal Zauberman & James Bettman
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although subjective judgment of future time plays an important role in a variety of decisions, little is known about the factors that influence such judgments and their implications. Based on a time as distance metaphor and its associated conceptual mapping between space and time, this article demonstrates that spatial distance influences judgment of future time. Participants who consider a longer spatial distance judge the same future time to be longer than those considering a shorter distance. Intertemporal preferences, for which judgment of future delays is a critical factor, also shift with consideration of spatial distance: participants who consider a longer spatial distance also reveal a greater degree of impatience in intertemporal decisions as they perceive a longer delay to future rewards. The current findings support the importance of subjective judgment of future time in intertemporal preferences by introducing a factor that changes time perception without directly changing the value of outcomes.
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Decision making under hypoxia: Oxygen depletion increases risk seeking for losses but not for gains
Stefania Pighin et al.
Judgment and Decision Making, July 2012, Pages 472-477
Abstract:
We report a preliminary study that compared decisions made in an oxygen depleted environment with those made in a normoxic environment. Participants were presented with a series of choices that involved either losses or gains. For each choice they were forced to choose between a sure thing and a gamble of the same expected value. For choices involving losses, participants were more risk seeking in the oxygen depleted environment; for those involving gains, no difference was found.
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Self-Regulatory Depletion Increases Emotional Reactivity in the Amygdala
Dylan Wagner & Todd Heatherton
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
The ability to self-regulate can become impaired when people are required to engage in successive acts of effortful self-control, even when self-control occurs in different domains. Here, we used functional neuroimaging to test whether engaging in effortful inhibition in the cognitive domain would lead to putative dysfunction in the emotional domain. Forty-eight participants viewed images of emotional scenes during functional magnetic resonance imaging in two sessions that were separated by a challenging attention control task that required effortful inhibition (depletion group) or not (control group). Compared to the control group, depleted participants showed increased activity in the left amygdala to negative but not to positive or neutral scenes. Moreover, whereas the control group showed reduced amygdala activity to all scene types (i.e., habituation) the depletion group showed increased amygdala activity relative to their pre-depletion baseline, however this was only significant for negative scenes. Finally, depleted participants showed reduced functional connectivity between the left amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex during negative scene processing. These findings demonstrate that consuming self-regulatory resources leads to an exaggerated neural response to emotional material that appears specific to negatively valenced stimuli and further suggests a failure to recruit top-down prefrontal regions involved in emotion regulation.
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Two heads are less bubbly than one: Team decision-making in an experimental asset market
Stephen Cheung & Stefan Palan
Experimental Economics, September 2012, Pages 373-397
Abstract:
In the world of mutual funds management, responsibility for investment decisions is increasingly entrusted to small teams instead of individuals. Yet the effect of team decision-making in a market environment has never been studied in a controlled experiment. In this paper, we investigate the effect of team decision-making in an asset market experiment that has long been known to reliably generate price bubbles and crashes in markets populated by individuals. We find that this tendency is substantially reduced when each decision-making unit is instead a team of two. This holds across a broad spectrum of measures of the severity of mispricing, both under a continuous double-auction institution and in a call market. The result is not driven by reduced turnover due to time required for deliberation by teams, and continues to hold even when subjects are experienced. Our result also holds not only when our teams treatments are compared to the 'narrow' baseline provided by the corresponding individuals treatments, but also when compared more broadly to the results of the large body of previous research on markets of this kind.
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Decision Making and Risk Aversion in the Cash Cab
Richard Bliss, Mark Potter & Christopher Schwarz
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use the Emmy Award-winning game show Cash Cab to study decision-making in a risky framework. This is a unique environment because, unlike other game shows used to examine risk-aversion, players participate individually or in teams varying in number from two to five. This creates a natural laboratory to measure performance and risk aversion conditional upon the size of the team as well as the characteristics of the team members. Teams are much more likely to complete overall tasks successfully. Most importantly, risk aversion estimates indicate that when participants are part of a group, they focus on the overall size of the dollar amounts that are "at risk", rather than their "slice of the pie". The implications of our results span a number of areas where groups are part of the financial decision-making process, including investment analysis and portfolio management, corporate governance, and corporate finance.
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Engaging in self-regulation results in low-level construals
Sabrina Bruyneel & Siegfried Dewitte
European Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research has suggested that self-regulation results in low-level construals but has inferred construal levels after self-regulation only indirectly, through construal-dependent judgments and choices. In the present paper, we demonstrate a direct link between engaging in self-regulation and low-level construals, by manipulating self-regulation and subsequently assessing construal levels using well-established and straightforward measures of construal level in three studies. Participants who engaged in self-regulation subsequently provided lower egocentric spatial distance estimates (Studies 1A and 1B), formed more groups when categorizing objects (Study 2), and used more concrete language when describing cartoon main characters' behavior (Study 3) than participants who did not engage in self-regulation. These findings provide direct evidence that low-level construals result from engaging in self-regulation.
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Heritability and Longitudinal Stability of Impulsivity in Adolescence
Sharon Niv et al.
Behavior Genetics, May 2012, Pages 378-392
Abstract:
Impulsivity is a multifaceted personality construct that plays an important role throughout the lifespan in psychopathological disorders involving self-regulated behaviors. Its genetic and environmental etiology, however, is not clearly understood during the important developmental period of adolescence. This study investigated the relative influence of genes and environment on self-reported impulsive traits in adolescent twins measured on two separate occasions (waves) between the ages of 11 and 16. An adolescent version of the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS) developed for this study was factored into subscales reflecting inattention, motor impulsivity, and non-planning. Genetic analyses of these BIS subscales showed moderate heritability, ranging from 33-56% at the early wave (age 11-13 years) and 19-44% at the later wave (age 14-16 years). Moreover, genetic influences explained half or more of the variance of a single latent factor common to these subscales within each wave. Genetic effects specific to each subscale also emerged as significant, with the exception of motor impulsivity. Shared twin environment was not significant for either the latent or specific impulsivity factors at either wave. Phenotypic correlations between waves ranged from r = 0.25 to 0.42 for subscales. The stability correlation between the two latent impulsivity factors was r = 0.43, of which 76% was attributable to shared genetic effects, suggesting strong genetic continuity from mid to late adolescence. These results contribute to our understanding of the nature of impulsivity by demonstrating both multidimensionality and genetic specificity to different facets of this complex construct, as well as highlighting the importance of stable genetic influences across adolescence.