Rodrigues Johannes, Ruthenberg Patrick, Mussel Patrick, Hewig Johannes
Department of Psychology I: Differential Psychology, Personality Psychology and Psychological Diagnostics, Julius-Maximilians-University of Würzburg, Marcusstraße 9-11, 97,070, Würzburg, Germany.
Division for Personality Psychology and Psychological Assessment, Free University Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Curr Psychol. 2022 Aug 8:1-11. doi: 10.1007/s12144-022-03553-6.
Risk proneness and the lack of loss aversion are two different reasons to show varying degrees of risk-taking in decision situations. So far, little is known about the extent to which these two processes underly the influence of trait greed, trait anxiety, and age. The present study investigated risk- taking in decision making in these trait contexts using two variants of the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) in an online study: A gain only and a mixed gambling BART. This was done to separate risk proneness from loss aversion. Individuals with high trait greed showed an increased risk decision-making behavior due to an increased risk proneness and not due to a reduced loss aversion. This is partly in contrast with previous findings in other tasks assessing risk proneness and loss aversion. These differences may be caused by the changes of perception during the gain only task. No significant effects were found for trait anxiety or age concerning risk-taking in decision-making behavior. Possible explanations for the lack of influence of these constructs are skewed distributions, omitting pathologically anxious subjects in anxiety and a restricted age range. The findings suggest that a lack of loss aversion is not a driving factor to explain elevated risk-taking in decision-making behavior in persons with high trait greed, but a higher reaction to reward in predominantly rewarding contexts.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-022-03553-6.
风险倾向和缺乏损失厌恶是在决策情境中表现出不同程度冒险行为的两个不同原因。到目前为止，对于这两个过程在多大程度上构成特质贪婪、特质焦虑和年龄影响的基础，人们了解甚少。本研究在一项在线研究中使用气球模拟风险任务（BART）的两个变体，即仅收益型和混合赌博型BART，来调查这些特质背景下决策中的冒险行为。这样做是为了将风险倾向与损失厌恶区分开来。高特质贪婪的个体由于风险倾向增加而非损失厌恶降低，表现出增加的风险决策行为。这在一定程度上与之前在其他评估风险倾向和损失厌恶的任务中的发现相反。这些差异可能是由仅收益任务期间感知的变化引起的。在决策行为的冒险方面，未发现特质焦虑或年龄有显著影响。这些构念缺乏影响的可能解释是分布不均衡、在焦虑研究中遗漏了病态焦虑的受试者以及年龄范围受限。研究结果表明，缺乏损失厌恶不是解释高特质贪婪者决策行为中冒险行为增加的驱动因素，而是在主要是奖励性情境中对奖励有更高的反应。
在线版本包含可在10.1007/s12144-022-03553-6获取的补充材料。
