Shabat-Simon Maytal, Shuster Anastasia, Sela Tal, Levy Dino J
Coller School of Management, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Ohalo College, Katzrin, Israel.
Front Psychol. 2018 May 23;9:750. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00750. eCollection 2018.
Hunger is a powerful driver of human behavior, and is therefore of great interest to the study of psychology, economics, and consumer behavior. Assessing hunger levels in experiments is often biased, when using self-report methods, or complex, when using blood tests. We propose a novel way of objectively measuring subjects' levels of hunger by identifying levels of alpha-amylase (AA) enzyme in their saliva samples. We used this measure to uncover the effect of hunger on different types of choice behaviors. We found that hunger increases risk-seeking behavior in a lottery-choice task, modifies levels of vindictiveness in a social decision-making task, but does not have a detectible effect on economic inconsistency in a budget-set choice task. Importantly, these findings were moderated by AA levels and not by self-report measures. We demonstrate the effects hunger has on choice behavior and the problematic nature of subjective measures of physiological states, and propose to use reliable and valid biologically based methods to overcome these problems.
饥饿是人类行为的强大驱动力，因此在心理学、经济学和消费者行为研究中备受关注。在实验中评估饥饿程度时，使用自我报告方法往往存在偏差，而使用血液检测则较为复杂。我们提出了一种通过识别唾液样本中α-淀粉酶（AA）酶的水平来客观测量受试者饥饿程度的新方法。我们使用这种测量方法来揭示饥饿对不同类型选择行为的影响。我们发现，饥饿会增加彩票选择任务中的风险寻求行为，改变社会决策任务中的报复心水平，但在预算设定选择任务中对经济不一致性没有可检测到的影响。重要的是，这些发现受到AA水平的调节，而不是自我报告测量的调节。我们证明了饥饿对选择行为的影响以及生理状态主观测量的问题性质，并建议使用可靠且有效的基于生物学的方法来克服这些问题。
