Abstract
Physiological and emotional states can affect our decision-making processes, even when these states are seemingly insignificant to the decision at hand. We examined whether posture and postural threat affect decisions in a non-related economic domain. Healthy young adults made a series of choices between economic lotteries in various conditions, including changes in body posture (sitting vs. standing) and changes in elevation (ground level vs. atop a 0.8-meter-high platform). We compared three metrics between conditions to assess changes in risk-sensitivity: frequency of risky choices, and parameter fits of both utility and probability weighting parameters using cumulative prospect theory. We also measured skin conductance level to evaluate physiological response to the postural threat. Our results demonstrate that body posture does not significantly affect decision making. Secondly, despite increased skin conductance level, economic risk-sensitivity was unaffected by increased threat. Our findings indicate that economic choices are fairly robust to the physiological and emotional changes that result from posture or postural threat.
Highlights
Have you ever wondered whether you were in the right frame of mind to make a decision? Converging evidence suggests that physiological and emotional states affect decision making, even when these states are not salient to the decision task
Our findings indicate that neutral postures such as sitting and standing are inconsequential to an unrelated economic task, and risk-sensitivity in an economic domain is less sensitive to emotional state than in the motor domain
The platform height in this experiment was constrained by our laboratory ceiling, we are pursuing alternative techniques to increase perceived threat. This is the first study to examine the effect of posture or postural threat on economic decision-making
Summary
Have you ever wondered whether you were in the right frame of mind to make a decision? Converging evidence suggests that physiological and emotional states affect decision making, even when these states are not salient to the decision task. A recent study demonstrated that metabolic state can alter risk-sensitivity in an unrelated economic decision-making task, suggesting similar neurobiological correlations for the representation of value and uncertainty across task domains (Symmonds et al, 2010). Another group found that action planning can influence our perceptions (Witt & Brockmole, 2012). This outcome appears to support a theory of event encoding, where action planning biases perception (i.e., planning an action involving a gun results in a bias to identify other objects as guns) because action-based and perceptual representations involve shared neural processes. There could be many subtle changes in our bodies or environment that contribute to choices we make under risk
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