Risk Taking
Imagine a gambler in a Vegas casino. He walks in with his friends, planning to make one small bet. Just one pull of the one-armed bandit. 12 hours later, he’s sad, broke, and wondering where it all went wrong.
My primary interest in risk-taking behavior is trying to understand the dynamics underlying events like the one described above by viewing the problem as a series of escalating decisions as opposed to any single decision moment. To do so, we need to use model risk-taking as a multi-stage process. One of the studies I led which did so looked at decision-making on the Balloon Analogue Risk Task, a well-known paradigm in which participants inflate balloons for cash while trying not to go too far and cause them to explode.
I was interested in seeing if, firstly, we could model the response to the rising reward levels as an escalating process and, secondly, whether folks who reported higher levels of resistance to peer influence would have a reduction in that response (i.e., less of a “buzz”). My results showed support for both those ideas, showing that not only FRN does indeed map onto those factors but that its response was reduced in individuals who reported higher levels of resistance to peer influence, suggesting that getting less of a “buzz” from risk-related rewards plays an important role in resisting the often questionable urgings of one’s peers to engage in high-risk behaviors.
Kiat, J.E., Straley, E., Cheadle, J. E. (2016). Escalating Risk and the Moderating Effect of Resistance to Peer Influence on the P200 and Feedback Related Negativity. Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience
I then extended this “escalation” approach to model risk-taking reactivity in a pretty fun way. This time, we were interested in seeing if individual differences in binge drinking tendencies were related to how reactive those individuals were while engaging in risk-taking behavior. Since we couldn’t safely get people to binge drink in the lab, I designed a risk-taking experience around the Crocodile Dentist game instead. That’s right, this Crocodile Dentist game.
Using this task, we could then look at how their brains’ responses to pressing a tooth changed as a function of how many teeth had already been depressed (i.e., changes in risk level). Our results showed that, as predicted, individuals who reported engaging in binge drinking behavior had increased reactivity at higher levels of risk relative to non-bingers. Suggesting that one of the factors underlying binge drinking behavior is the rush one gets from engaging in high-risk behaviors.
