Abstract
Stress pervades everyday life and impedes risky decision making. The following experiment is the first to examine effects of stress on risky decision making in the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), while measuring inspection time and conscious awareness of deck contingencies. This was original as it allowed a fine grained rigorous analysis of the way that stress impedes awareness of, and attention to maladaptive financial choices. The extended Cognitive Reflection Task (CRT) further afforded examination of the impact of impaired reflective thinking on risky decision making. Stressed participants were slower to avoid the disadvantageous decks and performed worse overall. They inspected disadvantageous decks for longer than the control condition and were slower in developing awareness of their poor deck quality compared to the control condition. Conversely, in the control condition greater inspection times for advantageous decks were observed earlier in the task, and better awareness of the deck contingencies was shown as early as the second block of trials than the stress condition. Path analysis suggested that stress reduced IGT performance by impeding reflective thinking and conscious awareness. Explicit cognitive processes, moreover, were important during the preliminary phase of IGT performance—a finding that has significant implications for the use of the IGT as a clinical diagnostic tool. It was concluded that stress impedes reflective thinking, attentional disengagement from poorer decks, and the development of conscious knowledge about choice quality that interferes with performance on the IGT. These data demonstrate that stress impairs risky decision making performance, by impeding attention to, and awareness of task characteristics in risky decision making.
Highlights
Stress is a mental tension that arises in uncontrollable situations and results in a compensatory psychological and physiological response (Lovallo, 2016)
Simonovic et al (2017a,b) argued that cognitive processes and conscious awareness influence the development of somatic markers and suggested that the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) performance is best understood through the interplay between emotional and analytic processes within a dual process account
Cognitive reflection task (CRT) performance under stress— A Mann–Whitney test showed differences in Cognitive Reflection Task (CRT) scores between the two groups: participants in the stress condition had lower CRT scores (Median = 1, IQR = 5) than participants in the control condition (Median = 4.5, IQR = 7) U = 128, p < 0.001, r = 0.72 demonstrating that reflective thinking was inhibited by stress
Summary
Stress is a mental tension that arises in uncontrollable situations and results in a compensatory psychological and physiological response (Lovallo, 2016). The IGT was developed to test the SMH and emotion-based learning, by mimicking real life decision making with risks, rewards and punishments (Bechara et al, 1994). Evidence indicated that somatic markers help advantageous decision making during IGT performance (e.g., Bechara et al, 1994; Bechara and Damasio, 2005), subsequent studies challenged this view—showing that analytic thinking and explicit knowledge of the deck contingencies played a more significant role in the IGT than previously thought (e.g., Maia and McClelland, 2004; Bowman et al, 2005; Simonovic et al, 2017a,b). Simonovic et al (2017a,b) argued that cognitive processes and conscious awareness influence the development of somatic markers and suggested that the IGT performance is best understood through the interplay between emotional and analytic processes within a dual process account (see e.g., Kahneman, 2011)
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