Control Alters Risk-Taking: The Motivating Impact of Action-Effectiveness in Different Risk Contexts

  • Noam Karsh
  • , Idan Haklay
  • , Noi Raijman
  • , Almog Lampel
  • , Ruud Custers

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    Risk-taking is traditionally explained through outcome-value expectancy models. Recently, however, it has been demonstrated that immediate versus delayed feedback increases risk-taking independently of expected value. The current work takes a novel approach to investigate behavioral motivation in different risk-taking contexts, building on recent progress in identifying the reinforcing impact of actioneffectiveness. Participants performed 1 of 2 different versions of the Balloon Analogue Risk task (BART) in which an action increases (Experiment 1 and 2) or decreases (Experiment 3) the risk of losing real money. Importantly, action-effectiveness was subtly manipulated. In 3 experiments, we found that action-effectiveness reinforces action tendency in both risk-taking contexts. In addition, the reinforcing effect was independent of participants’ explicit knowledge regarding the action-effectiveness manipulation and their deliberate expectancy-based risk strategy.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)475–486
    JournalMotivation Science
    Volume7
    Issue number4
    DOIs
    StatePublished - Dec 2021

    Bibliographical note

    Publisher Copyright:
    © 2021 American Psychological Association

    Keywords

    • action-selection
    • control
    • motivation
    • risk-taking behavior
    • sense of agency

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Environmental Engineering
    • Developmental and Educational Psychology
    • Applied Psychology
    • Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

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