This week, we have Dr Florian Schmitz, University of Ulm, visiting and giving a talk in our Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology colloquium (title and abstract follow).

Assessment of risk-taking and self-control in the laboratory

A number of laboratory paradigms have been suggested as behavioral measures of risk-taking vs. self-control in the laboratory. Most of them require decision making between response options that are probabilistically associated with different levels of gain or loss. In my talk, I will focus on three of the most frequently used tasks: delay and probability discounting, the balloon-analogue risk task (BART), and the Iowa Gambling Task. Findings obtained in several studies will be presented that shed light at the suitability of the employed tasks for the assessment of individual differences. Different scoring algorithms as well as process dissociation modeling will be discussed. Generally, results obtained indicate problematic reliability or specificity of the tasks. Additionally, the assessment method and the content domain affect validity.