Type of army service and decision to engage in risky behavior among young people in Israel
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2015, Vol 10, Issue 2
Abstract
Previous studies have examined the impact of military service on the decision to engage in risky behavior. Yet most of these studies focused on voluntary recruits, did not distinguish between legal and illegal risky activities and did not compare combat and non-combat soldiers during and after service according to gender. The current study is unique because of the nature of Israeli compulsory army service. It examines the relationship between type of army service and five legal and illegal risky behaviors for three groups: non-combat, combat without fighting experience, and combat with fighting experience. We also examine differences in the propensity for risky behavior between men, most of whom are assigned to combat units due to the army’s needs, and women, who serve in combat units on a voluntary basis only. A questionnaire survey was randomly distributed at train stations and central bus stations in Israel among 413 soldiers and ex-soldiers between the ages of 18-30. The predictor variables include type of service or battle experience, the Evaluation of Risks scale and socio-demographic characteristics. In general, we found that high percentages of young people engage in risky behavior, especially illegal behavior. The results indicate that fighting experience is significantly and positively correlated with the consumption of illegal substances for currently serving men soldiers (but not for women) and this effect is mitigated after discharge from the army. Importantly, the use of illegal substances is not a result of the individual’s preferences for engaging in various risky behaviors. Thus, our results suggest that the effect of the increased propensity toward risky behavior following the experience of fighting overrides the combat unit’s discipline for men when it comes to the consumption of illegal substances. In addition, our findings indicate that serving in a combat unit as opposed to a non-combat unit affects the tendency of women ex-combat soldiers to travel to risky destinations, though this is probably related to their original higher risk attitude, since women must volunteer for combat units.
Authors and Affiliations
Sharon Garyn-Tal and Shosh Shahrabani
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678187
- DOI -
- Views 140
- Downloads 0
Does moving from war zone change emotions and risk perceptions? A field study of Israeli students
The current field study uses data collected after the 2009 war between Israel and the Hamas militias in the Gaza Strip ended. The study compares recalled emotions and perceived risks among two groups of students, all of...
Success-slope effects on the illusion of control and on remembered success-frequency
The illusion of control refers to the inference of action-outcome contingency in situations where outcomes are in fact random. The strength of this illusion has been found to be affected by whether the frequency of succe...
Learning to reason: The influence of instruction, prompts and scaffolding, metacognitive knowledge, and general intelligence on informal reasoning about everyday social and political issues
Twelve experiments examined ways of improving informal reasoning, as assesed by presenting students with accessible, current, and interesting social and political issues, eliciting reasoning about them, and scoring the r...
Possession, feelings of ownership and the endowment effect
Research in judgment and decision making generally ignores the distinction between factual and subjective feelings of ownership, tacitly assuming that the two correspond closely. The present research suggests that this a...
Forecasting elections with mere recognition from small, lousy samples: A comparison of collective recognition, wisdom of crowds, and representative polls
We investigated the extent to which the human capacity for recognition helps to forecast political elections: We compared naïve recognition-based election forecasts computed from convenience samples of citizens’ recognit...