Predicting (un)healthy behavior: A comparison of risk-taking propensity measures
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2012, Vol 7, Issue 6
Abstract
We compare four different risk-taking propensity measures on their ability to describe and to predict actual risky behavior in the domain of health. The risk-taking propensity measures we compare are: (1) a general measure of risk-taking propensity derived from a one-item survey question (Dohmen et al., 2011), (2) a risk aversion index calculated from a set of incentivized monetary gambles (Holt & Laury, 2002), (3) a measure of risk taking derived from an incentive compatible behavioral task—the Balloon Analog Risk Task (Lejuez et al., 2002), and (4) a composite score of risk-taking likelihood in the health domain from the Domain-Specific Risk Taking (DOSPERT) scale (Weber et al., 2002). Study participants are 351 clients of health centers around Witbank, South Africa. Our findings suggest that the one-item general measure is the best predictor of risky health behavior in our population, predicting two out of four behaviors at the 5% level and the remaining two behaviors at the 10% level. The DOSPERT score in the health domain performs well, predicting one out of four behaviors at the 1% significance level and two out of four behaviors at the 10% level, but only if the DOSPERT instrument contains a hypothetical risk-taking item that is similar to the actual risky behavior being predicted. Incentivized monetary gambles and the behavioral task were unrelated to actual health behaviors; they were unable to predict any of the risky health behaviors at the 10% level. We provide evidence that this is not because the participants had trouble understanding the monetary trade-off questions or performed poorly in the behavioral task. We conclude by urging researchers to further test the usefulness of the one-item general measure, both in explaining health related risk-taking behavior and in other contexts.
Authors and Affiliations
Helena Szrek, Li-Wei Chao, Shandir Ramlagan and Karl Peltzer
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678028
- DOI -
- Views 140
- Downloads 0
Counterfactual thinking and regulatory fit
According to regulatory fit theory (Higgins, 2000), when people make decisions with strategies that sustain their regulatory focus orientation, they ``feel right'' about what they are doing, and this ``feeling-right'' ex...
Are good reasoners more incest-friendly? Trait cognitive reflection predicts selective moralization in a sample of American adults
Two studies examined the relationship between individual differences in cognitive reflection (CRT) and the tendency to accord genuinely moral (non-conventional) status to a range of counter-normative acts — that is, to t...
Accounting for reciprocity in negotiation and social exchange
People generally adhere to the norm of reciprocity during both tacit and negotiated exchange. Emotional responses generated from profitable and unprofitable exchange facilitate the formation of motives to settle scores w...
Subjective integration of probabilistic information from experience and description
I report a new judgment task designed to investigate the subjective weights allotted to experience and description when integrating information from the two sources. Subjects estimated the percentage of red balls in a ba...
Different heuristics and same bias: A spectral analysis of biased judgments and individual decision rules
We used correlation and spectral analyses to investigate the cognitive structures and processes producing biased judgments. We used 5 different sets of driving problems to exemplify problems that trigger biases, specific...