Sense of Agency as a predictor of risk-taking

Control alters risk-taking: The motivating impact of action-effectiveness in different risk contexts.

“…In the present article, we tested whether independently of expected value, risk-taking is influenced by immediate versus delayed action effects. In the two first experiments, we largely replicated the findings of Damen (2019), demonstrating that immediate effects increased risk-taking measured by the Balloon Analogue Risk task (BART). However, as increased action tendencies and increased risk-taking are confounded in the BART, we conducted a crucial third experiment for which we developed an inverse version of the BART (iBART) in which increased action tendencies led to lower risk-taking.…”

“…Thus, one may argue that participants were willing to make more pump responses in the Immediate condition because they were quicker. Importantly, however, Damen (2019) controlled for such discrepancy between the two conditions and still obtained the same effect on the adjusted mean number of pumps. In addition, as mentioned above, we attempted to minimize participants’ urgency to finish the experiment and their potential attempts to inflate more balloons by presenting the experiment duration to be longer than it lasted and by informing them that the number of balloons to be inflated is fixed.…”

“…At any point, participants can secure their monetary gain by saving the accumulated money or press a key to pump the balloon for another step and risk an explosion and the loss of the accumulated money on that trial. Damen (2019) found that immediate feedback increased explicitly reported experiences of agency as well as the two key indicators of risk-taking (Lejuez et al, 2002) in the BART: the adjusted average number of pumps and the number of popped balloons. However, while Damen suggested that experienced agency influenced participants’ perceived ability to control risks which in turn increased their pumping responses, recent developments in cognitive psychology and neuroscience suggest that such action-effectiveness—a perceptual effect that is contingent and temporally contiguous on one’s action—may promote action-tendency directly, that is independent of explicit judgments and deliberate outcome expectancy-based considerations (Eitam et al, 2013; Hemed et al, 2020; Karsh et al, 2016; Karsh et al, 2020; Karsh & Eitam, 2015a; Penton et al, 2018; Tanaka et al, 2021).…”

“…Recently, however, it was demonstrated that risk-taking is also increased by factors unrelated to expected outcome value directly. Damen (2019) found that risk-taking in the Balloon Analog Risk task (BART; Lejuez et al, 2002) was increased when participants received immediate, rather than delayed feedback. In the original BART, participants accumulate money by inflating a virtual balloon.…”

Perspectives on managing fisheries for community wellbeing in the face of climate change

“…A sense of agency may influence if and how individuals respond to stressors, including the environmental changes associated with climate change (Brown and Westaway, 2011). Agency also influences risk perception and risk-taking behaviors (Damen, 2019). Agency, or the ability to take action, mobilize resources, and make progress towards objectives aligned with one's values (Sen, 1985), has been identified as a valuable social science indicator (Hicks et al, 2016) and is applied as such in the selfdetermination attribute in the framework used in this study (Breslow et al, 2016).…”