I can take the risk, but you should be safe: Self-other differences in situations involving physical safety
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2013, Vol 8, Issue 3
Abstract
Prior research on self-other differences involving risk have found that individuals make riskier decisions for others than for the self in situations where risk taking is valued. We expand this research by examining whether the direction of self-other differences reverses when risk aversion is valued, as predicted by social values theory (Stone & Allgaier, 2008). Two studies tested for self-other differences in physical safety scenarios, a domain where risk aversion is valued. In Study 1, participants read physical safety and romantic relationship scenarios and selected what they would decide for themselves, what they would decide for a friend, or what they would predict their friend would decide. In Study 2, participants read public health scenarios and either decided or predicted for themselves and for a friend. In keeping with social values theory, participants made more risk-averse decisions for others than for themselves in situations where risk aversion is valued (physical safety scenarios) but more risk-taking decisions for others than for themselves in situations where risk taking is valued (relationship scenarios). Further, we show that these self-other differences in decision making do not arise from incorrectly predicting others’ behaviors, as participants predicted that others’ decisions regarding physical safety scenarios would be either similar (Experiment 1) or more risk taking (Experiment 2) than their own decisions.
Authors and Affiliations
Eric R. Stone, YoonSun Choi, Wandi Bruine de Bruin and David R. Mandel
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678057
- DOI -
- Views 103
- Downloads 0
Charting the internal landscape: Affect associated with thoughts about major life domains explains life satisfaction
Studies of happiness have examined the impact of demographics, personality and emotions accompanying daily activities on life satisfaction. We suggest that how people feel while contemplating aspects of their lives, incl...
Savings, subgoals, and reference points
Decision makers often save money for a specific goal by forgoing discretionary consumption and instead putting the money toward the savings goal. We hypothesized that reference points can be exploited to enhance this typ...
Establishing the relevance of non-compensatory choice algorithms from stated choice surveys – an exploration
In applied sciences large-scale surveys are a popular means to acquire insights in the choices that people make in different contexts. In transportation research, for example, tens of thousands stated their choices betwe...
High-stakes hedges are misunderstood too. A commentary on: “Valuing bets and hedges: Implications for the construct of risk preference”
Frederick, Levis, Malliaris & Meyer (2018) report a package of laboratory studies where participants underestimate the value of “hedges”: Risky bets which cancel out the risk of another presently-held bet. However, it mi...
Exemplar-based inference in multi-attribute decision making: Contingent, not automatic, strategy shifts?
Several studies propose that exemplar retrieval contributes to multi-attribute decisions. The authors have proposed a process theory enabling a priori predictions of what cognitive representations people use as input to...