Abstract
Humans frequently make choices that involve risk for health and well-being. At the same time, information about others’ choices is omnipresent due to new forms of social media and information technology. However, while past research has shown that peers can exert a strong influence on such risky choices, understanding how information about risky decisions of others affects one’s own risky decisions is still lacking. We therefore developed a behavioral task to measure how information about peer choices affects risky decision-making and call it the social Balloon Analogue Risk Task (sBART). We tested this novel paradigm in a sample of 52 college young adults. Here we show that risky decisions were influenced in the direction of the perceived choices of others – riskier choices of others led to riskier behavior whereas safer choices of others led to less risky behavior. These findings indicate that information about peer choices is sufficient to shape one’s own risky behavior.
Highlights
In our daily life, we are regularly confronted with decisions that can have serious consequences for health and well-being
An important focus in the risky decision-making literature is the investigation of peer susceptibility[11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23], and peer influence has been assessed via multiple approaches
It is unclear how peer influence on dichotomous choices between riskier and safer gambles relates to real-life peer susceptibility in risky decision making
Summary
We are regularly confronted with decisions that can have serious consequences for health and well-being. Analysis of behavioral measures of peer susceptibility has shown that peers can influence choices by providing explicit suggestions encouraging riskier play[20,21,22,24,25] or by their mere presence[15,16,17,18,26]. A fine-grained measure to quantify the magnitude of peer susceptibility in risky decision-making is lacking so far It is unclear how peer influence on dichotomous choices between riskier and safer gambles relates to real-life peer susceptibility in risky decision making. The present study sought to add new insights into the understanding of how choices of others affect risky decision making by employing a novel paradigm providing a trial-by-trial continuous measure of the magnitude of peer influence
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