Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, USA.
Sci Rep. 2018 Apr 12;8(1):5129. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-23455-7.
Humans frequently make choices that involve risk for health and well-being. At the same time, information about others' choices is omnipresent due to new forms of social media and information technology. However, while past research has shown that peers can exert a strong influence on such risky choices, understanding how information about risky decisions of others affects one's own risky decisions is still lacking. We therefore developed a behavioral task to measure how information about peer choices affects risky decision-making and call it the social Balloon Analogue Risk Task (sBART). We tested this novel paradigm in a sample of 52 college young adults. Here we show that risky decisions were influenced in the direction of the perceived choices of others - riskier choices of others led to riskier behavior whereas safer choices of others led to less risky behavior. These findings indicate that information about peer choices is sufficient to shape one's own risky behavior.
人类经常做出涉及健康和幸福的风险选择。与此同时，由于新形式的社交媒体和信息技术，有关他人选择的信息无处不在。然而，尽管过去的研究表明同伴可以对这种冒险选择产生强烈影响，但人们对他人冒险决策信息如何影响自己的冒险决策仍知之甚少。因此，我们开发了一种行为任务来衡量有关同伴选择的信息如何影响冒险决策，并将其称为社会气球模拟风险任务（sBART）。我们在 52 名大学生样本中测试了这个新的范式。在这里，我们表明，风险决策受到他人感知选择的影响——他人的风险选择导致更冒险的行为，而他人的安全选择则导致更安全的行为。这些发现表明，同伴选择的信息足以塑造自己的冒险行为。
