Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Entscheidungspsychologie


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How do people render self-reports of their willingness to take risks?

Markus Steiner, Florian Seitz, and I have a new paper (just published in Decision) in which we investigate the cognitive processes underlying people’s self-reports of their risk preferences. Specifically, we were interested in the information-integration processes that people may rely on during judgment formation, with a particular focus on the type of evidence people may consider when rendering their self-reports. In doing so, we aimed to contribute to a better understanding of why self-reports typically achieve high degrees of convergent validity and test-retest reliability, thus often outperforming their behavioral counterparts (i.e., monetary lotteries and other lab tasks).

To achieve these goals we employed the process-tracing method of aspect listing, to thus gain “a window into people’s mind” while they render self-reports. Our cognitive modeling analyses illustrated that people are particularly sensitive to the strength of evidence of the information retrieved from memory during judgment formation. Interestingly, people’s self-reported risk preferences and the strength of evidence of the retrieved aspects remained considerable stable in a retest study (i.e., across a one-month interval). Moreover, intraindividual changes in the latter were closely aligned with intraindividual changes in the former – suggesting that a relatively reliable psychological mechanism is at play when people render self-reports.

Beyond our quantitative modeling analyses, the process-tracing method of aspect listing also rendered possible more qualitative insights, such as concerning the sources and contents of the information people retrieved from memory (see the word clouds below). To learn more about all further details on this, please have a look at the paper!

Steiner, M., Seitz, F., & Frey, R. (2021). Through the window of my mind: Mapping information integration and the cognitive representations underlying self-reported risk preference. Decision, 8, 97–122. doi:10.1037/dec0000127 | PDF

First appeared on https://renatofrey.net/blog

New paper in JEP-Gen: Is representative design the key to valid assessments of people’s risk preferences?

A large body of research has documented the relatively poor psychometric properties of behavioral measures of risk taking, such as low convergent validity and poor test–retest reliability. In this project we examined the extent to which these issues may be related to violations of “representative design” – the idea that experimental stimuli should be sampled or designed such that they represent the environments to which measured constructs are supposed to generalize.

To this end, we focused on one of the most prominent behavioral measures of risk taking, the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). Our analyses demonstrate that the typical implementation of the BART violates the principle of representative design, and strongly conflicts with the expectations people might have formed from real balloons. We conducted two extensive empirical studies (N = 772 and N = 632), aimed at testing the effects of improved representative designs. Indeed, participants acquired more accurate beliefs about the optimal behavior in the BART due to these task adaptions. Yet strikingly, these improvements proved to be insufficient to enhance the task’s psychometric properties (e.g., convergent validity with other measures of risk preference and related constructs). We conclude that for the development of valid behavioral measurement instruments, our field has to overcome the philosophy of the “repair program” (i.e., fixing existing tasks). Instead, the development of valid task designs may require ecological assessments that identify those real-life behaviors and associated psychological processes that lab tasks are supposed to capture and generalize to.

This is a joint project with Markus Steiner (see picture below), who successfully defended his thesis last week – congratulations, Dr. Steiner!

Steiner, M., & Frey, R. (2021). Representative design in psychological assessment: A case study using the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. doi:10.1037/xge0001036 | PDF

First appeared on https://renatofrey.net/blog

 

New paper: Using brain activation to predict risk taking

Taking risks is an adaptive aspect of human life that can promote happiness and success. However, engagement in maladaptive risk taking can have detrimental effects on individual as well as societal levels of health, wealth and criminality. One approach to understanding and, ultimately, predicting individual differences in risk taking has been to illuminate the biological substrates, specifically the neural pathways. In the past, brain activation has been associated with or even found to be predictive of risky behaviors, yet one fundamental problem of existing studies relates to the challenge of measuring risk taking: convergence between risk-taking measures is low, both at the level of behavior and brain activation. By extension, whether brain activation is merely correlated with or actually predictive of real-life risky behaviors is also likely to vary as a function of the measure used.

In our new paper, out in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, we addressed this issue by analyzing within-participant neuroimaging data for two widely used risk-taking tasks collected from the imaging subsample of the Basel–Berlin Risk Study (N = 116 young human adults). We focused on core brain regions implicated in risk taking, and examined average (that is, group-level) activation for risky versus safe choices in the Balloon Analogue Risk Task and a Monetary Gambles task. Importantly, we also examined associations between individuals’ brain activation in risk-related brain areas and various risk-related outcomes, including psychometrically derived risk preference factors. We found that, on average, risky decisions in both tasks were associated with increased activation in the nucleus accumbens, a small subcortical brain structure with a central role in the brain’s reward circuitry. However, the results from our individual differences analyses support the idea that the presence and directionality of associations between brain activation and risk taking varies as a function of the risk-taking measures used to capture individual differences.

Read the full paper here for a thorough discussion of the findings, including implications for intervention and prevention efforts, and our recommendations for future research aimed at predicting real-life behavior from brain markers.

Citation: Tisdall, L., Frey, R., Horn, A., Ostwald, D., Horvath, L., Pedroni, A., Rieskamp, J., Blankenburg, F., Hertwig, R. and Mata, R., 2020. Brain–Behavior Associations for Risk Taking Depend on the Measures Used to Capture Individual Differences. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 14, p.194.

Registered reports: A way to publish when data collection is paused

During the last few months, COVID-19 has affected everyone’s lives to some extent. For researchers like us psychologists that rely on data collection involving human interaction, this sometimes meant a complete halt of all research activities because laboratories had to be closed. Especially for early-career researchers, several months of not being able to collect data can have serious consequences. They need publications to graduate, but they often need data to publish in journals.

Traditionally, psychologists first collect data and then write an article. Recently, more and more journals in our field have introduced a format that allows us to publish before we collect data, namely “registered reports”. The idea is that the research question, the hypotheses, the study details, and the planned analyses undergo peer review before data collection. Authors thereby receive critical feedback and can improve their studies before they invest valuable resources. This way, the ideas and the soundness of the proposed research are evaluated instead of whether the results are “interesting”. If the manuscript then meets the journal’s requirements, the article receives an in-principle acceptance. That means, it will be published no matter how the results turn out (given that the authors follow the procedures previously agreed upon). Studies that do not yield the expected results are therefore still being published and do not disappear in the “file drawer”, which happens all too often.

Besides these benefits, registered reports enable researchers to add publications to their CV even when they cannot collect data in the lab, as was the case with our registered report. In our article, we propose three studies to examine whether the act of sharing secrets influences the relationship between two people. Intuitively, one might think it does. It might, however, also depend on the nature of the secrets shared, meaning whether they are positive or whether they shine a negative light on the person who shares them.  All of this has not been studied yet.

Before our work was accepted as a first stage registered report at PLOS ONE, it went through peer review at two other journals and the respective feedback helped us to craft the current and more compelling paper. We hope that the COVID-19 situation remains under control and that we will soon be able to collect data. Yet, even during the lockdown, we were able to contribute to the scientific literature and will complement our work with data as soon as possible.

Jaffé, M., & Douneva, M. (2020). Secretive and close? How sharing secrets may impact perceptions of distance. PLOS ONE, 15: e0233953. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0233953

NARPS: Inside and beyond

Perhaps you remember a previous blog post in which we (Laura Fontanesi and Loreen Tisdall) announced an exciting research collaboration we were part of: the Neuroimaging Analysis Replication and Prediction Study (NARPS). Fast forward 18 months, and we are happy to announce that the resultant paper (Botvinik-Nezer et al., 2020, Nature) is now published, you can read it here. Below, we share a summary of the study, the results, and our thoughts on what to make of it all.

Inside NARPS

Our adventure with NARPS started at the meeting of the Society for NeuroEconomics in Philadelphia in October 2018. That’s where we met Tom Schonberg, busy with recruiting analysis teams for the project. The main idea of NARPS’ leading researchers was to collect a somewhat large (n > 100) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) dataset, provide this data to many teams across the world, and ask them to independently test nine predefined hypotheses. The task chosen for this endeavor was a mixed-gambles task, which is widely used for studying decision-making under risk. Crucially, the motivation behind the project was not to find the truth about value-related signals in the human brain. Instead, the goal was to estimate the agreement across independent research teams on hypothesis testing based on fMRI data, when little to no instructions are provided on the methods or software to be used. On top of that, the project leaders were planning to let a second group of researchers bet on the results of such agreement, before the results were out. In light of the replication crisis in psychology and to a lesser extent also in economics, a study on the reliability of empirical findings in neuroeconomics seemed almost due at that point. Plus, this study reminded us of a similar many-analysts project in the cognitive modeling field, where independent teams were asked to use a cognitive model to test behavioral effects of experimental manipulations, and found that conclusions were affected by the specific software they used. 

The most crucial result coming from NARPS is that the agreement on null hypothesis rejection was overall quite low. On average, across the nine hypotheses, 20% of the teams reported a different result from the majority of the teams. Crucially, maximum disagreement between teams is marked by 50% (i.e., 50% of teams report results which support, and 50% of teams report results which reject a given hypothesis). Given this benchmark, a 20% disagreement rating is almost ‘halfway’ between maximum agreement and maximum disagreement. Surprisingly, the probability to find a significant result was not affected by the choice of using preprocessed data, and the statistical brain activation maps (before thresholding) were highly correlated across the teams. Therefore, the statistical decisions that are made in later stages of fMRI analyses (e.g., how to correct for multiple corrections) might actually play the most crucial role in null hypothesis testing. In addition, the prediction market revealed an “optimism bias”: Researchers (including a subset of researchers who had participated in the data analysis part of NARPS) overestimated the probability of finding significant results.

Beyond NARPS

The title of the NARPS publication is ‘Variability in the analysis of a single neuroimaging dataset by many teams’. Importantly, variability in analytical pipelines is not a problem, per se. In fact, we often engage with the analytical multiverse that surrounds every single piece of research (simply because there are always varying ways of examining research questions and testing hypotheses) and check the sensitivity of our results to analytical variability. However, the NARPS findings suggest that the use of different analytical pipelines can produce results which support opposite conclusions. In the spirit of replicability, this is not a desired outcome. 

So, what now? Should we scrap all neuroimaging research? In our opinion, the NARPS findings highlight two important issues: (1) open science is the way to go, and (2) more many-analysts projects are needed to understand how widespread this problem is across tasks, brain regions, and/or neuroimaging techniques.

First, let’s start with the main take-home message of the paper: Considering that analytical decisions can have a big impact on research findings and conclusions, it is of crucial importance to thoroughly plan and clearly communicate analytical pipelines. In other words, go full throttle on transparency and open science: Preregister your study, apply optimized preprocessing pipelines, consider the suitability of your smoothing kernel given your anatomical regions of interest, be transparent about significance thresholds, share your code and data, and share your unthresholded activation maps. 

Second, we think it is also important to consider the generalizability of the NARPS findings. In particular, we noticed that the choice of the behavioral task was not part of the public discourse (see here and here for examples) triggered by the NARPS publication. In our opinion, individual differences play an important role in the mixed-gambles task, both at the behavioral (risk preferences) and the neural level, and such variability can lead to lower statistical power (especially when spatial smoothing is not optimal for a given anatomical region). On top of that, response times (RTs) in this task are difficult to dissociate from the signal of interest, because RTs are highly correlated with option values. In fact, this could cause power issues that might not be relevant for other neuroeconomics tasks, or tasks in different psychological domains. 

To understand the role of the task and, importantly, the extent to which the NARPS findings generalize to the entire field of neuroimaging, ideally we would use the NARPS approach to study variability in results observed for (1) other decision-making tasks, (2) other fields, such as visual perception, (3) off-task functional activation differences (resting state), (4) other imaging modalities (e.g., EEG, MEG, eye tracking), and (5) other methodological approaches (e.g., model-based cognitive neuroscience). When polled on Twitter, 64.6% of M/EEG researchers (N=601) indicated that a similar approach in their field would lead to results that are more consistent than the results found for fMRI; the jury is out on whether this response pattern mirrors the overconfidence reported for fMRI results.

In summary, we thoroughly enjoyed being part of NARPS. This project was not only timely, but revealed that we might be overly optimistic about the reliability of fMRI analyses. It also revealed that our statistical decisions in the analysis pipeline (e.g., how to correct for multiple comparisons) make substantial contributions to this lack of reliability (as opposed to decisions during data preprocessing). Our hope is that NARPS will motivate more many-analyst projects in different neuroimaging subfields and methodologies.

Registered report on competitive decisions from experience published in JDM

We often (have to) make choices between risky options without knowing the possible outcomes upfront. Sometimes, however, we can obtain a preview through active information search (e.g., sampling reviews on Tripadvisor to choose one of two hotels). But what if other people simultaneously pursue the same goal, forcing us to make decisions from experience under competitive pressure (“only one room left at this price”)? In this paper, I studied to what extent competition reduces pre-decisional search (and potentially choice performance) in different choice environments. A set of simulation analyses and empirical studies indicated that reduced search due to competitive pressure was particularly detrimental for choice performance in “wicked” environments, which contain rare events and thus require ample exploration to identify advantageous options. Interestingly, however, from a cost-benefit perspective and taking into account search costs, frugal search may not only be efficient in “kind” but also in “wicked” environments. For the full results, please have a look here:

Frey, R. (2020). Decisions from experience: Competitive search and choice in kind and wicked environments. Judgment and Decision Making, 15, 282-303. Online | PDF

On a side note, in this project I was up for some exploration myself: In the spirit of trying out new avenues for promoting transparent and reproducible research, I was committed to publish this paper as a registered report (RR). The idea of this relatively new publication format is to run the paper’s theoretical rationale through the full peer-review process at a scientific journal, with the goal of obtaining “in-principle acceptance” before the empirical studies are conducted. It was a very interesting but sometimes also difficult process, as it may be particularly hard to convince reviewers of the soundness and importance of the research questions a-priori, without being able to present fancy results yet. So I am glad that this paper found a nice home at JDM, and I hope that more psychological journals will adopt the format of RRs soon!

For more on my research on decisions from experience, please also see the research section.

First appeared on https://renatofrey.net/blog

New Perspectives on the Aging Lexicon

Rui and I have a new paper out in which we discuss the role of environmental exposure and several cognitive mechanisms in producing changes in the mental lexicon, our storage of linguistic and semantic information, across the adult life span. We argue that models of the aging mental lexicon must integrate both ecological and psychological factors and propose a research framework that distinguishes environmental exposure from cognitive mechanisms of learning, representation, and retrieval of information. This article, co-authored with 21 colleagues from the fields of Linguistics, Psychology, and Neuroscience, is the product of the Symposium of the Aging Lexicon held in Basel, Switzerland, on June 7-9, 2018. Learn more about the Symposium and its contributors at aginglexicon.github.io.

Wulff, D. U., De Deyne, S., Jones, M. N., Mata, R., & Aging Lexicon Consortium. (2019). New perspectives on the aging lexicon. Trends in cognitive sciences, 23(8), 686-698. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2019.05.003

taming uncertainty

Ralph Hertwig et al. have a new book out, Taming Uncertainty, that covers much of the recent work done at the Center for Adaptive Rationality, which aims to understand how humans deal with uncertainty. The book features some chapters from CDS researchers including Dirk Wulff et al. (“Adaptive exploration: What you see is up to you”) and Renato Frey and myself (“The life-span development of risk preference”). Here’s is the summary from MIT Press:

Taming Uncertainty

An examination of the cognitive tools that the mind uses to grapple with uncertainty in the real world.

How do humans navigate uncertainty, continuously making near-effortless decisions and predictions even under conditions of imperfect knowledge, high complexity, and extreme time pressure? Taming Uncertainty argues that the human mind has developed tools to grapple with uncertainty. Unlike much previous scholarship in psychology and economics, this approach is rooted in what is known about what real minds can do. Rather than reducing the human response to uncertainty to an act of juggling probabilities, the authors propose that the human cognitive system has specific tools for dealing with different forms of uncertainty. They identify three types of tools: simple heuristics, tools for information search, and tools for harnessing the wisdom of others. This set of strategies for making predictions, inferences, and decisions constitute the mind’s adaptive toolbox.

The authors show how these three dimensions of human decision making are integrated and they argue that the toolbox, its cognitive foundation, and the environment are in constant flux and subject to developmental change. They demonstrate that each cognitive tool can be analyzed through the concept of ecological rationality—that is, the fit between specific tools and specific environments. Chapters deal with such specific instances of decision making as food choice architecture, intertemporal choice, financial uncertainty, pedestrian navigation, and adolescent behavior.

Toss and turn or toss and stop?

Rainer Greifeneder, Mariela Jaffé, and I have a new paper out in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, in which we examine how simply seeing a random device such as a coin flip providing a suggestion can influence the need for information before settling for a decision. No matter whether it’s a hypothetical decision about prolonging someone’s contract, judging which one of two backpacks costs more, or deciding which medical charity receives money – coin participants are less likely to request additional information and indicate a lower need for additional information compared to control participants without a coin flip. Interestingly, participants do not necessarily adhere to the coin but stick to their preliminary decision as much as or even more than the control group. A coin flip may thereby help to avoid decision blocks or the collection of too much information.

Douneva, M., Jaffé, M., & Greifeneder, R. (2019). Toss and turn or toss and stop? A coin flip reduces the need for information in decision-making Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 83, 132-141. doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2019.04.003

Beyond attractiveness: A multimethod approach to study enhancement in self-recognition on the Big Two personality dimensions

Matt Keller and I have a new paper out in which we present two methods to measure biases in individuals’ self-perception. These methods have the advantage that they neither involve introspection nor any external standards of comparison. One of these methods (Study 1) allows systematic modeling of specific personality dimensions in participants’ own faces in a theory-driven way and measurement of self-enhancement regarding these dimensions. The other method (Study 2) allows measurement of self-enhancement in a purely data-driven way by extracting the dimensions of self-enhancement from random noise patterns applied to participants’ own faces. Results from two studies reveal that individuals self-enhance regarding both Big Two personality dimensions (i.e., agency and communion).

The Figure above visualizes the female (A) and male (B) color (row 1), shape (row 2), and full self-enhancement vector applied to the female (A) and the male (B) average face from the Basel Face Model (row 3) and to individual participants’ faces (row 4) extracted in Study 2.

These novel methods might advance theory regarding self-enhancement in the long run, because they allow investigation of self-enhancement (and self-protection) regarding various dimensions (e.g., facial, personality, typicality of a certain group membership), various groups of individuals (e.g., from different cultural backgrounds, age groups), and individuals in different situations (e.g., by temporarily manipulating self-esteem or
group membership), thus providing information about inter-group, inter-individual, and intra-individual differences in self-enhancement.

With regard to the benefits of self-enhancement, such as being happy and caring about the self and others (Taylor & Brown, 1988), detecting the groups or individuals who are successful, and the situations that facilitate doing so, seems to be a critical endeavor for future research.

Walker, M., & Keller, M. (2019). Beyond attractiveness: A multi-method approach to study enhancement in self-recognition on the Big Two personality dimensions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000157   

Cognitive and Neural Bases of Multi-Attribute, Multi-Alternative, Value-based Decisions

Imagine you want to buy a car. First, there are only two cars available and you make your decision. You like car A more than car B. But in the last moment, the vendor presents you a third option: Car C. According to economic principles, the third option should not change your preference of car A over car B. Yet, many empirical studies have shown that people’s preferences between two options can depend on a third alternative, a phenomenon referred to as context effects. In multi-attribute, multi-alternative, value-based decisions (as in the car example) these context effects appear and are not well met by traditional static decision theories.

In this review paper, we (Jörg Rieskamp and Sebastian Gluth) joined forces with Jerome Busemeyer from Indiana University and Brandon Turner from Ohio State University to discuss the advantages and the features of sequential sampling decision-making models that are able to account for context effects in multi-attribute, multi-alternative, value-based decisions. Despite important differences, all of these models assume that the process of multi-attribute, multi-alternative decision making uses the attribute features of options as inputs, compares those attributes across options and then integrates the comparisons across time to produce an accumulated preference for each option until a threshold is reached (see the Figure).

 

 

These sequential sampling models generally make better predictions than traditional economic choice models as they account for context effects. Furthermore, sequential sampling models make it possible to predict decision time and implications for eye movements and neural activation: There is evidence from fMRI studies that the posterior parietal cortex is linked to the feature processing of input options at the beginning of the decision process. Another important brain area is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) which plays a role in the attribute comparison process. The dorsolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex are thought to be implicated in the evidence accumulation process. However, to better understand the neural circuitry underlying multi-attribute, multi-alternative decisions, we argue that further studies that make use of EEG and its exquisite temporal resolution will be necessary.

 

Busemeyer, J. R., Gluth, S., Rieskamp, J., & Turner, B. M. (2019). Cognitive and Neural Bases of Multi-Attribute, Multi-Alternative, Value-based Decisions. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(3), 251–263. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.12.003

Developmental differences in value‐based decisions from memory

Sebastian Horn, Thorsten Pachur, and I have a new paper out comparing children and young adults on value-based decisions from memory. We adapted a neat paradigm (see above for a rough depiction) that allows a good control of the information to be compared in memory and can give some insight in to potential differences between children of different ages and adults’ decisions requiring the comparison of gains and losses from memory. Our results suggest that children were somewhat less efficient in making such decisions due to developmental differences in both memory and aritmethic abilities. We believe this work illustrates how it is possible to assess the contribution of different core abilities (such as memory or arithmetic skill) to individual and age differences in decision making.  The abstract and full reference are given below.

Good + Bad = ? Developmental Differences in Balancing Gains and Losses in Value‐Based Decisions From Memory

Value‐based decisions often involve comparisons between benefits and costs that must be retrieved from memory. To investigate the development of value‐based decisions, 9‐ to 10‐year olds (N = 30), 11‐ to 12‐year olds (N = 30), and young adults (N = 30) first learned to associate gain and loss magnitudes with symbols. In a subsequent decision task, participants rapidly evaluated objects that consisted of combinations of these symbols. All age groups achieved high decision performance and were sensitive to gain–loss magnitudes, suggesting that required core cognitive abilities are developed early. A cognitive‐modeling analysis of performance revealed that children were less efficient in object evaluation (drift rate) and had longer nondecision times than adults. Developmental differences, which emerged particularly for objects of high positive net value, were linked to mnemonic and numerical abilities.

Horn, S. S., Mata, R., & Pachur, T. (2019). Good + Bad = ? Developmental Differences in Balancing Gains and Losses in Value-Based Decisions From Memory. Child Development, 107, 21767. http://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13208

 

How similarity between choice options affects decisions from experience: The accentuation-of-differences model

Gestern wurde unser Aufsatz zur Kontextabhängigkeit erfahrungsbasierter Entscheidungen bei Psychological Review veröffentlicht. Dieses Manuskript ist eine Open-Access-Publikation und ist daher für alle unter http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/rev0000122 frei zugänglich.

Zusammenfassung

Im Alltag treffen Menschen viele verschiedene Entscheidungen. Manche dieser Entscheidungen basieren auf expliziten Beschreibungen der verschiedenen Alternativen, wohingegen in anderen Fällen die Eigenschaften der Alternativen zunächst durch Erfahrungen mit diesen erlernt werden müssen. Eine der bemerkenswerten Beobachtungen in der Entscheidungsforschung ist die Kontextabhängigkeit von Entscheidungen, also dass Entscheidungen von den zur Verfügung stehenden Alternativen abhängen. Durch diese Kontextabhängigkeit entstehen eine Reihe von sogenannten Kontexteffekten, die Verletzungen der normativen Entscheidungstheorie darstellen. Es wird häufig angenommen, dass eine mehrdimensionale Repräsentation der Eigenschaften von Alternativen der Hauptgrund für die Entstehung von Kontexteffekten ist. In dem Manuskript entwickeln wir das accentuation-of-differences-Modell, das diese Annahme infrage stellt. Dieses Lernmodell nimmt an, dass keine explizite Repräsentation der Eigenschaften von Alternativen gebildet wird, sondern dass die Nützlichkeit von Alternativen eindimensional erlernt wird. Jedoch wird diese Repräsentation von Nützlichkeit kontextabhängig erlernt; Alternativen, deren Ausgänge über die Zeit ähnlich sind, werden als weniger attraktiv erachtet. Unser Modell sagt bestimmte Verhaltensmuster vorher, die durch andere Modelle nicht erklärt werden können. In einer Reihe von Experimenten zeigen wir, dass erfahrungsbasierte Entscheidungen kontextabhängig sind und dass das accentuation-of-differences-Modell das Verhalten am besten beschreiben kann.

Spektor, M. S., Gluth, S., Fontanesi, L., & Rieskamp, J. (2019). How similarity between choice options affects decisions from experience: The accentuation-of-differences model. Psychological Review, 126, 52-88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/rev0000122

Three gaps and what they may mean for risk preference

Ralph Hertwig, Dirk Wulff, and I have a new paper out that identifies/summarizes three gaps that have emerged from recent work in economics and psychology on risk preference…

Three gaps and what they may mean for risk preference 

Risk preference is one of the most important building blocks of choice theories in the behavioural sciences. In economics, it is often conceptualized as preferences concerning the variance of monetary payoffs, whereas in psychology, risk preference is often thought to capture the propensity to engage in behaviour with the potential for loss or harm. Both concepts are associated with distinct measurement traditions: economics has traditionally relied on behavioural measures, while psychology has often relied on self-reports. We review three important gaps that have emerged from work stemming from these two measurement traditions: first, a description– experience gap which suggests that behavioural measures do not speak with one voice and can give very different views on an individual’s appetite for risk; second, a behaviour–self-report gap which suggests that different self-report measures, but not behavioural measures, show a high degree of convergent validity; and, third, a temporal stability gap which suggests that self-reports, but not behavioural measures, show considerable temporal stability across periods of years. Risk preference, when measured through self-reports—but not behavioural tests—appears as a moderately stable psychological trait with both general and domain-specific components. We argue that future work needs to address the gaps that have emerged from the two measurement traditions and test their differential predictive validity for important economic, health and well-being outcomes. 

Hertwig, R., Wulff, D. U., & Mata, R. (2019). Three gaps and what they may mean for risk preference. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 374(1766), 20180140–10. http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2018.0140

New publication on the interplay of attention and decision making

In this work, we sought to resolve a current debate on the influence of a third (distractor) option on the probability of choosing the better out of two other alternatives. One study reported that more valuable distractors make it more difficult to pick the best option (Louie et al., 2013, PNAS), but another study found just the opposite (Chau et al., 2014, Nature Neuroscience). In four experiments with a total of 147 participants, we used the paradigm of Chau and colleagues, added a specific set of trials, manipulated decision time, measured eye movements, and applied cognitive modeling to make sense of this controversy.

Remarkably, we neither found a positive nor a negative effect of the distractor’s value on the relative probability of choosing the best or the second-best option. Instead, better distractors were chosen more often themselves (even though participants were instructed not to pick them) and slowed down the choice process, thereby leading to longer response times and more failures to stay within the time limit. The best explanation for these effects was that the amount of attention spent on the distractor increased with its value. This was confirmed by eye-tracking data (see the figure): Participants looked more on high-value distractors (D), which made it more difficult for them to choose accurately. Finally, we analyzed the behavioral data of Chau and colleagues and found out that their effect resulted from a statistical artifact. Our study highlights the role of attention in speeded decision making as well as the importance of testing the robustness of previously published results.

Gluth, S.*, Spektor, M.S.*, & Rieskamp, J. (2018). Value-based attentional capture affects multi-alternative decision making. eLife, 7, e39659.

Toward more methodological diversity in evolutionary psychology

Andreas Wilke and Peter Todd have organised a special issue of Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences that includes a number of contributions showcasing examples of methodological diversity in the field, including the use of agent-based simulations, field work with non-human animals, and laboratory studies, to name but a few.

Bettina von Helversen, Andreas Wilke, Greg Samanez-Larkin, and I contributed a piece on the lack of convergent validity between measures of foraging (i.e., search for resources) using laboratory tasks. This work highlights how latent variable (structural equation) modeling can help understand commonalities and differences across paradigms that have been used in the behavioural sciences to understand the cognitive processes and individual differences underlying foraging behavior.

Foraging, exploration, or search? On the (lack of) convergent validity between three behavioral paradigms

Recently it has been suggested that individual humans and other animals possess different levels of a general tendency to explore or exploit that may influence behavior in different contexts. In the present work, we investigated whether individual differences in this general tendency to explore (exploit) can be captured across three behavioral paradigms that involve exploration–exploitation trade-offs: A foraging task involving sequential search for fish in several ponds, a multiarmed bandit task involving repeatedly choosing from a set of options, and a sequential choice task involving choosing a candidate from a pool of applicants. Two hundred and sixty-one participants completed two versions of each of the three tasks. Structural equation modeling revealed that there was no single, general factor underlying exploration behavior in all tasks, even though individual differences in exploration were stable across the two versions of the same task. The results suggest that task-specific factors influence individual levels of exploration. This finding causes difficulties in the enterprise of measuring general exploration tendencies using single behavioral paradigms and suggests that more work is needed to understand how general exploration tendencies and task-specific characteristics translate into exploratory behavior in different contexts.

von Helversen, B., Mata, R., Samanez-Larkin, G. R., & Wilke, A. (2018). Foraging, exploration, or search? On the (lack of) convergent validity between three behavioral paradigms. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 12(3), 152-162.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000121

 

age differences in intertemporal choice

David Richter and I have a new paper out on age differences in intertemporal choice. We analyzed data from the German Socio-economic panel asking individuals between 18 and 96 years of age to decide between a smaller-sooner amount, say 200 EUR today, or a larger-later amount, say ca. 310 EUR in 1 year. Our results suggest (at least for longer delay conditions; the blue lines in the figure above) a weak U-shaped association between age and “patience”, with young and older adults being less patient (i.e., preferring the immediate payment more often) relative to middle-aged adults (the red line represents the effect for a 1-month delay). We conclude that future work needs to consider time horizon more closely when investigating the adult development of intertemporal choice (title, abstract, and reference below).

Age Differences in Intertemporal Choice: U-Shaped Associations in a Probability Sample of German Households

To describe adult age differences in intertemporal choice, we analyzed data from 1,491 participants who completed an incentivized monetary intertemporal discounting choice task involving different conditions (e.g., time delay of 12 months vs. 1 month). Respondents completed a number of other survey measures including behavioral measures of cognitive ability and self-reports concerning health, financial security, and demographic characteristics. We found significant quadratic (U-shaped) effects of age in task conditions involving 12-month (but not 1-month) delays, with middle-aged adults proving most patient relative to younger and older adults. The age effects found were robust to the inclusion of covariates, including cognitive ability, that have been suggested to underlie individual and age differences in time preferences. The results favor theories that propose nonlinear effects of age-related processes or multiple mechanisms underlying the development of intertemporal choice across the life span and suggest that it is important to consider long time delays and wide age ranges when trying to understand age differences in time preferences.

Richter, D., & Mata, R. (2018). Age differences in intertemporal choice: U-shaped associations in a probability sample of German households. Psychology and Aging. http://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000266

risk preference: a view from psychology

The latest issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives has a Symposium on Risk in Economics and Psychology with four contributions, including our own perspective! One novel contribution of our piece is that we quantify the temporal stability of both behavioural (monetary lotteries) and self-reported risk preference (“How risk taking are you in general?”) over periods of years (up to a decade). Self-reports trump lotteries by quite a bit (see figure below)…

Risk Preference: A View from Psychology

Psychology offers conceptual and analytic tools that can advance the discussion on the nature of risk preference and its measurement in the behavioral sciences. We discuss the revealed and stated preference measurement traditions, which have coexisted in both psychology and economics in the study of risk preferences, and explore issues of temporal stability, convergent validity, and predictive validity with regard to measurement of risk preferences. As for temporal stability, do risk preference as a psychological trait show a degree of stability over time that approximates what has been established for other major traits, such as intelligence, or, alternatively, are they more similar in stability to transitory psychological states, such as emotional states? Convergent validity refers to the degree to which different measures of a psychological construct capture a common underlying characteristic or trait. Do measures of risk preference all capture a unitary psychological trait that is indicative of risky behavior across various domains, or do they capture various traits that independently contribute to risky behavior in specific areas of life, such as financial, health, and recreational domains? Predictive validity refers to the extent to which a psychological trait has power in forecasting behavior. Intelligence and major personality traits have been shown to predict important life outcomes, such as academic and professional achievement, which suggests there could be studies of the short- and long-term outcomes of risk preference—something lacking in current psychological (and economic) research. We discuss the current empirical knowledge on risk preferences in light of these considerations.

Mata, R., Frey, R., Richter, D., Schupp, J., & Hertwig, R. (2018). Risk Preference: A View from Psychology. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 32(2), 155–172. http://doi.org/10.1257/jep.32.2.155

risk preference and endogenous hormone levels

Jenny Kurath (former student and research assistant in our group) and I have a new paper out on the links between endogenous hormonal levels (testosterone, estradiol, cortisol) and risk preference (broadly defined, and including self-report and behavioural measures of risk taking, and related constructs, such as impulsivty or sensation seeking). In a nutshell, the literature suggests small positive links between testosterone and estradiol (around .1) but not cortisol (average estimate pretty much zero). We did not find evidence for differences between types of measures (self-report, behaviour) or constructs (e.g., risk taking, sensation seeking). Lots of heterogeneity across studies (particularly for cortisol) but no evidence of publication bias (e.g., p-hacking) for any of the effects. According to these effect sizes, around 90% or more of studies on testosterone and estradiol have been underpowered… It’s very nice to see this work partly stemming from Jenny’s BSc thesis published and we hope it is informative for future work examining the biological basis of risk preference!

Individual differences in risk taking and endogeneous levels of testosterone, estradiol, and cortisol: A systematic literature search and three independent meta-analyses

Hormonal levels have been hypothesized to serve as proximal biological mechanisms underlying individual differences in risk taking. We conducted a systematic literature search and independent meta-analyses to assess the link between endogenous testosterone, estradiol, and cortisol levels and risk-taking related constructs (i.e., risk-taking propensity, impulsivity, sensation seeking, novelty seeking). We found small correlations between risk-taking constructs and testosterone (r = 0.12, 95% CI = 0.08, 0.16, 108 effect sizes, k = 49, N = 9112) as well as estradiol (r = 0.10, 95% CI = 0.02, 0.18, 48 effect sizes, k = 17, N = 2900), but not cortisol (r = -0.01, 95% CI = -0.11, 0.09, 60 effect sizes, k = 27, N = 3880). Overall, these results suggest a biological foundation for individual differences in risk taking. We point out some limitations of past studies and make recommendations for future work investigating the hormonal basis of individual differences in risk taking.

Kurath, J, & Mata, R (2018). Individual differences in risk taking and endogeneous levels of testosterone, estradiol, and cortisol: A systematic literature search and three independent meta-analyses. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2018.05.003

Computational neuroscience across the life span

Wouter van den Bos, Rasmus Bruckner, Matthew Nassar, Ben Eppinger, and I, have a new review out discussing promises and challenges of computational neuroscience to understanding life span development (title and abstract follow).

Computational Neuroscience across the Lifespan: Promises and Pitfalls

In recent years, the application of computational modeling in studies on age-related changes in decision making and learning has gained in popularity. One advantage of computational models is that they provide access to latent variables that cannot be directly observed from behavior. In combination with experimental manipulations, these latent variables can help to test hypotheses about age-related changes in behavioral and neurobiological measures at a level of specificity that is not achievable with descriptive analysis approaches alone. This level of specificity can in turn be beneficial to establish the identity of the corresponding behavioral and neurobiological mechanisms. In this paper, we will illustrate applications of computational methods using examples of lifespan research on risk taking, strategy selection, and reinforcement learning. We will elaborate on problems that can occur when computational neuroscience methods are applied to data of different age groups. Finally, we will discuss potential targets for future applications and outline general shortcomings of computational neuroscience methods for research on human lifespan development.

van den Bos, W., Bruckner, R., Nassar, M., Mata, R., & Eppinger, B. (2017). Computational neuroscience across the lifespan: Promises and pitfalls. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2017.09.008

Dopamine across the life span

Karreretal

Reduced dopamine receptors and transporters but not synthesis capacity in normal aging adults: A meta-analysis

Many theories of cognitive aging are based on evidence that dopamine (DA) declines with age. Here, we performed a systematic meta-analysis of cross-sectional positron emission tomography and single- photon emission-computed tomography studies on the average effects of age on distinct DA targets (receptors, transporters, or relevant enzymes) in healthy adults (N = 95 studies including 2611 participants). Results revealed significant moderate to large, negative effects of age on DA transporters and receptors. Age had a significantly larger effect on D1- than D2-like receptors. In contrast, there was no significant effect of age on DA synthesis capacity. The average age reductions across the DA system were 3.7%-14.0% per decade. A meta-regression found only DA target as a significant moderator of the age effect. This study precisely quantifies prior claims of reduced DA functionality with age. It also identifies presynaptic mechanisms (spared synthesis capacity and reduced DA transporters) that may partially account for previously unexplained phenomena whereby older adults appear to use dopaminergic resources effectively. Recommendations for future studies including minimum required samples sizes are provided.

 

Karrer, T. M., Josef, A. K., Mata, R., Morris, E. D., & Samanez-Larkin, G. R. (2017). Reduced dopamine receptors and transporters but not synthesis capacity in normal aging adults: a meta-analysis. Neurobiology of Aging, 57, 36–46. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2017.05.006

age differences in decisions under risk

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Thorsten Pachur, Ralph Hertwig, and I have a new paper out on age differences in risky choice (title, abstract, and reference follow).

Who Dares, Who Errs? Disentangling Cognitive and Motivational Roots of Age Differences in Decisions Under Risk

We separate for the first time the roles of cognitive and motivational factors in shaping age differences in decision making under risk. Younger and older adults completed gain, loss, and mixed-domain choice problems as well as measures of cognitive functioning and affect. The older adults’ decision quality was lower than the younger adults’ in the loss domain, and this age difference was attributable to the older adults’ lower cognitive abilities. In addition, the older adults chose the more risky option more often than the younger adults in the gain and mixed domains; this difference in risk aversion was attributable to less pronounced negative affect among the older adults. Computational modeling with a hierarchical Bayesian implementation of cumulative prospect theory revealed that the older adults had higher response noise and more optimistic decision weights for gains than did the younger adults. Moreover, the older adults showed no loss aversion, a finding that supports a positivity-focus (rather than a loss-prevention) view of motivational reorientation in older age.

Pachur, T., Mata, R., & Hetwig, R. (2017). Who dares, who errs? Disentangling cognitive and motivational roots of age differences in decisions under risk. Psychological Science. 

Memory and decision making

Regina Weilbächer and Sebastian Gluth have a new paper that reviews the roles as well as the interplay of hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in memory-based decisions.

The Interplay of Hippocampus and Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex in Memory-Based Decision Making

Episodic memory and value-based decision making are two widely studied psychological constructs. The hippocampus plays a central role in episodic memory, while the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is essential in value-based decision making.

In our review, we focus on the hippocampal-prefrontal interactions in value-based decisions that require memory retrieval. We briefly present two methods used to investigate the coupling of those two brain regions, such as the phase coherence across specific frequency ranges (i.e. theta and gamma band synchrony) and dynamic causal modeling of fMRI data. Additionally we present theories and frameworks resulting from these connectivity studies. In the end we raise open questions that need to be addressed in future investigations.

In summary, this review article gives an overview of the current research regarding the interplay of hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in memory and value-based decisions and discusses directions for future research on the neural and cognitive foundations of those decisions.

Weilbächer, R. A., & Gluth, S. (2017). The Interplay of Hippocampus and Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex in Memory-Based Decision Making. Brain Sciences, 7(1), 4.

The attraction effect

Sebastian Gluth, Jared Hotaling and Jörg Rieskamp have a new paper on the influence of the attraction effect on intertemporal choices and the coding of reward value in the brain.

The Attraction Effect Modulates Reward Prediction Errors and Intertemporal Choices

The attraction effect is a well-established phenomenon in decisions between three alternative. If a person is indifferent between two choice options (let’s say between staying in a cheap 2-star hotel vs an expensive 5-star hotel), adding a third option that is clearly inferior to one of the option (let’s say another 5-star hotel that is even more expensive) can change the preference between the inital options (in this case in favor of the first 5-star hotel). This effect refutes any model of decision making that assumes independent evaluations of options.

In our paper, we show that the attraction effect also influences the evaluation of rewards in the absence of choice, with respect to both self-reported satisfaction about rewards and brain activation of the reward system (measured with fMRI). We used intertemporal choices and rewards to elicit the attraction effect. Thus, we also demonstrated the attraction effect in intertemporal choice for the first time.

In summary, our study has important implications for models of intertemporal choice and shows the context-dependency of reward signals in the human brain.

Gluth, S., Hotaling, J.M., & Rieskamp, J. (2017). The attraction effect modulates reward prediction errors and intertemporal choices. Journal of Neuroscience, 37(2), 371-382.

risk attitudes

David Kellen, Clintin Davis-Stober, and I have a new paper out on risk attitudes (see below for title, abstract, and full reference).

In this work, we help further muddling the field by showing that individual and age differences are not consistent across different types of decision problems, such as those between two risky options involving gains, or losses, or both (as opposed to a risky option vs. a sure outcome which has been the focus of most past work). For example, we show that in some but not all gamble problems, age differences can be found…

Individual classification of strong risk attitudes: An application across lottery types and age groups

Empirical evaluations of risk attitudes often rely on a weak definition of risk that concerns preferences towards risky and riskless options (e.g., a lottery vs. a sure outcome). A large body of work has shown that individuals tend to be weak risk averse in choice contexts involving risky and riskless gains but weak risk seeking in contexts involving losses, a phenomenon known as the reflection effect. Recent attempts to evaluate age differences in risk attitudes have relied on this weak definition, testing whether the reflection effect increases or diminishes as we grow older. The present work argues that weak risk attitudes have limited generalizability and proposes the use of a strong definition of risk that is concerned with preferences towards options with the same expected value but different degrees of risk (i.e., outcome variance). A reanalysis of previously-published data and the results from a new study show that only a minority of individuals manifests the reflection effect under a strong definition of risk, and that, when facing certain lottery-pair types, older adults appear to be more risk seeking than younger adults.

Kellen, D., Mata, R., & Davis-Stober, C.P. (2017). Individual classification of strong risk attitudes: An application across lottery types and age groups. Psychological Bulletin & Review. doi: 10.3758/s13423-016-1212-5.

Seven Selfish Reasons for Preregistration

Many of you may already be convinced that preregistration is the only way to go to do truly confirmatory research and improve the reliability of psychological science. If you’re not convinced yet, or need a refreshment of the reasons why future replication catastrophes can be prevented by the implementation of registered reports, read for example this post by Chris Chambers.

However, even if you are completely convinced by the arguments for preregistration, you might think: What could preregistration bring me as a scientist? Why would I bother? To answer this question, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers and I present 7 selfish reasons to do so in the current issue of the APS observer.

To make it easier to memorise, we created this poster.poster_7_Selfish_Reasons

Changing the Personality of a Face: Perceived Big Two and Big Five Personality Factors Modeled in Real Photographs

Together with Thomas Vetter I have a paper out in which we present and successfully validate statistical models of the Big Two and the Big Five personality dimensions. These models identify and visualize the facial information individuals use to make certain personality judgments. Moreover, they can be used to manipulate the respective facial information in novel faces in a natural-looking way. Thus, these models might be useful tools for researchers to study impression formation and consequences of impressions from faces on judgments and decision making in various research fields.

all7

B2B5

Walker, M. & Vetter, T. (2016). Changing the personality of a face: Perceived Big Two and Big Five personality factors modeled in real photographs. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 110(4), 609-624. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000064

Sharing information about ourselves online means connecting, which applies to people and brain regions!

A new study has just been published in Scientific Reports that I was involved with at the Free University of Berlin. Dar Meshi, the lead author of the paper, is interested in how social information is processed in the brain, and in this paper we investigated whether individual differences in sharing information about oneself on Facebook translate into individual differences in region-specific neural connectivity. Basically, the idea was to see whether there is an association between how active people say they are on Facebook with regards to sharing self-related information (e.g. frequent changes or updates to one’s profile picture, information, status; frequent tagging and posting of pictures or videos) and how strongly different cortical regions connect when the brain is at rest (i.e. not involved in any particular task). Interestingly, our results support the idea of a brain-behavior association, for we found that how much people share about themselves on Facebook was associated with differential connectivity of cortical midline regions.

To read the full paper and find out how these regions are hypothesized to sub-serve self-related information sharing, go to http://www.nature.com/articles/srep22491.

Meshi, D., Mamerow, L., Kirilina, E., Morawetz, C., Margulies, D.S., & Heekeren, H.R. (2016). Sharing self-related information is associated with intrinsic functional connectivity of cortical midline brain regions. Scientific Reports, 6, 22491. DOI: 10.1038/srep22491

Stability and Change in Risk-Taking Propensity Across the Adult Life Span

Anika Josef, David Richter, Greg Samanez-Larkin, Gert Wagner, Ralph Hertwig, and I have a new paper out on risk taking (abstract below). We were particularly interested in understanding how risk taking changes across the life span and whether it does so differentially across different domains, such as in driving, finance, or health domains. We were able to analyse data from a large longitudinal panel representative of the German population and estimate how much risk-taking propensity changes across intervals of up to 10 years in adults of 18 to 85 years of age!

The results are quite interesting in suggesting that risk-taking propensity shows patterns of stability/change similar to those of other personality traits. For example, in the figure below, one can see an inverted U-shape pattern in test-retest stability (i.e., the correlation between two measurements that took place 5 or 10 years apart) across different life domains that matches what we know about other measures of personality such as the Big Five. The inverted-U shape indicates that there are periods in life, young adulthood and old age, when we are most likely to change our risk-taking propensity. One question raised by these results and that we hope to address in the future is what are the specific life events that lead to such changes…

stability

Stability and Change in Risk-Taking Propensity Across the Adult Life Span

Can risk-taking propensity be thought of as a trait that captures individual differences across domains, measures, and time? Studying stability in risk-taking propensities across the life span can help to answer such questions by uncovering parallel, or divergent, trajectories across domains and measures. We contribute to this effort by using data from respondents aged 18 to 85 in the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) and by examining (a) differential stability, (b) mean-level differences, and (c) individual-level changes in self-reported general (N = 44,076) and domain-specific (N = 11,903) risk-taking propensities across adulthood. In addition, we investigate (d) the correspondence between cross-sectional trajectories of self-report and behavioral measures of social (trust game; N = 646) and nonsocial (monetary gamble; N = 433) risk taking. The results suggest that risk-taking propensity can be understood as a trait with moderate stability. Results show reliable mean-level differences across the life span, with risk-taking propensities typically decreasing with age, although significant variation emerges across domains and individuals. Interestingly, the mean-level trajectory for behavioral measures of social and nonsocial risk taking was similar to those obtained from self-reported risk, despite small correlations between task behavior and self-reports. Individual-level analyses suggest a link between changes in risk-taking propensities both across domains and in relation to changes in some of the Big Five personality traits. Overall, these results raise important questions concerning the role of common processes or events that shape the life span development of risk-taking across domains as well as other major personality facets.

Josef, A. K., Richter, D., Samanez-Larkin, G. R., Wagner, G. G., Hertwig, R., Mata, R. (2016). Stability and change in risk-taking propensity across the adult life span. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000090

Risk Taking Across the Life Span and Around the Globe

Anika Josef, Ralph Hertwig, and I have a new paper out on cross-cultural differences in risk taking across the life span (abstract and reference below). We show that the typical age-risk curve varies systematically as a function of country characteristics. Specifically, we found that an index of hardship (i.e., an index of resource scarcity and, therefore, heightened competition in each country)  is significantly associated with the shape of the age-risk function: Hardship is associated with flatter age-risk curves and, consequently, smaller differences between younger and older individuals. We believe these results are important in helping portray life span differences in risk taking as psychological adaptations to local challenges and demands.

Propensity for Risk Taking Across the Life Span and Around the Globe

Past empirical work suggests that aging is associated with decreases in risk taking. But are such effects universal? Life-history theory suggests that the link between age and risk taking is a function of specific reproductive strategies that can be more or less risky depending on the ecology. We assessed variation in the age-risk curve using World Values Survey data from 77 countries (N = 147,118). The results suggest that propensity for risk taking tends to decline across the life span in the vast majority of countries. In addition, there is systematic variation among countries: Countries in which hardship (e.g., high infant mortality) is higher are characterized by higher levels of risk taking and flatter age-risk curves. These findings suggest that hardship may function as a cue to guide life-history strategies. Age-risk relations thus cannot be understood without reference to the demands and affordances of the environment.

Mata, R., Josef, A. K., & Hertwig, R. (2016). Propensity for risk taking across the life span and around the globe. Psychological Science. doi:10.1177/0956797615617811