E-Mail Network Patterns and Body Language Predict Risk-Taking Attitude

Jiachen Sun,Peter Gloor

doi:10.3390/fi13010017

Jiachen Sun, Peter Gloor

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/fi13010017

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Abstract

As the Enron scandal and Bernie Madoff’s pyramid scheme have shown, individuals’ attitude towards ethical risks can have a huge impact on society at large. In this paper, we compare risk-taking attitudes assessed with the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking (DOSPERT) survey with individual e-mail networking patterns and body language measured with smartwatches. We find that e-mail communication signals such as network structure and dynamics, and content features as well as real-world behavioral signals measured through a smartwatch such as heart rate, acceleration, and mood state demonstrate a strong correlation with the individuals’ risk-preference in the different domains of the DOSPERT survey. For instance, we found that people with higher degree centrality in the e-mail network show higher likelihood to take social risks, while using language expressing a “you live only once” attitude indicates lower willingness to take risks in some domains. Our results show that analyzing the human interaction in organizational networks provides valuable information for decision makers and managers to support an increase in ethical behavior of the organization’s members.

Highlights

The willingness of individuals to take ethical risks for personal gain has led to immense pain and loss for individuals and society
We investigate individual responsiveness in e-mail communication, i.e., how fast a responder replies to a sender, which plays an important role in dynamic communications analysis [43,44]
As for emotion, we find that participants who are happier in words are more risk-seeking in recreational activities and show a greater willingness to take risks in general

Summary

Introduction

The willingness of individuals to take ethical risks for personal gain has led to immense pain and loss for individuals and society. The head of the largest pyramid scheme in world history, and their readiness to take large ethical risks illustrates that it is of huge importance for society to investigate what triggers such risky behavior. It would be of great value to get early warning signs based on hidden “honest signals” of people such as Fastow, Skilling, or Madoff, to discourage such behavior in the future or stop it from happening in the first place. Despite a large literature gauging interindividual differences of risk-preference in psychology, relatively little is known about the hidden cues and predictors for riskpreference in terms of human daily behavior.

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