Sour Promotes Risk-Taking: An Investigation into the Effect of Taste on Risk-Taking Behaviour in Humans

Abstract

Taking risks is part of everyday life. Some people actively pursue risky activities (e.g., jumping out of a plane), while others avoid any risk (e.g., people with anxiety disorders). Paradoxically, risk-taking is a primitive behaviour that may lead to a happier life by offering a sense of excitement through self-actualization. Here, we demonstrate for the first time that sour - amongst the five basic tastes (sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and umami) - promotes risk-taking. Based on a series of three experiments, we show that sour has the potential to modulate risk-taking behaviour across two countries (UK and Vietnam), across individual differences in risk-taking personality and styles of thinking (analytic versus intuitive). Modulating risk-taking can improve everyday life for a wide range of people.

TasteBud

“…Such an approach has been used in previous works of gustatory interfaces in HCI (i.e. [8,10]) as well as in the investigation of the experiential characteristics of taste [13,22]. The latter is following the ISO specifications of taste concentrations [1].…”

“…The latter is following the ISO specifications of taste concentrations [1]. However, recent works suggest the use of higher taste concentrations to ensure detectability (see [5,6,17,22]).…”

Analysing and Demonstrating Tool-Supported Customizable Task Notations

“…Next,!we!describe!customization!in!Hamsters-XL!for!tasks!based!on!Vi!and!Obrist's!experiment! [63]! concerning!…”

“…19. Overview of the experimental procedure from [63] The!customizations!required!for!this!task!are!summarised!in! Table!6.!…”

Smell, Taste, and Temperature Interfaces

“…The sense of smell is what allows us to understand a wide range of everyday experiences, from pleasurable ones (good food) to detecting potential hazards (e.g., smell of rotten food or hazardous gases) [26]. Our sense of taste contributes to our understanding of flavor during consumption, can embody affective states [10,19], and affect human behavior [28]. Finally, our sense of temperature contributes to concepts of social proximity [13] and also impacts human behavior (e.g.…”