Maryland Neuroimaging Center, University of Maryland College Park.
Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2015 Feb;144(1):12-7. doi: 10.1037/xge0000043. Epub 2014 Dec 8.
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.
我们向他人推荐的风险行为类型与我们自己从事的风险行为类型之间存在很大差距。在这项研究中，我们假设造成这种差距的一个原因是，在决定自己是否冒险时，人们更依赖于关于他人行为的信息，而在决定是否向他人推荐这些行为时则不然。为了验证这一假设，我们要求参与者要么报告自己参与一系列风险行为的意愿；要么报告他们向所爱的人推荐这些行为的意愿；或者，他们或所爱的人参与这些行为的想法有多好。然后，我们要求他们根据风险的预期效用（收益、成本和成本发生的可能性）相关标准，以及他们所认识的人参与该活动的情况，对这些行为进行评估。我们发现，在考虑到感知收益、成本和成本发生可能性的影响后，参与者对他人行为的看法对他们参与风险的意愿的影响要远远大于他们推荐风险的意愿或对风险的规定性评估。这些发现表明，他人选择对冒险行为的影响是巨大的、直接的，不能用风险决策的经济效用模型来解释，并且与人们自己的更好判断背道而驰。
