The school year is about to start, and the University of Texas is about to be flooded with students. Every year, a few of those students end up doing silly things. The campus police blotter is filled with stories of strange risks large and small that students engage in.
There are many factors that can promote this kind of risk
taking. An interesting paper in the
April, 2012 issue of Psychological
Science by Jesse Chandler and Emily Pronin suggests that someone’s speed of
thinking might be one of them.
Quite a bit of work (much of it by Emily Pronin) has
explored influences of fast thinking on behavior. For example, fast thinking can improve your
mood.
In one study in this paper, participants were asked to read
a number of trivia statements. Some
people (the fast thinkers) were asked
to read at about twice their normal reading speed, while others (the slow thinkers) were asked to read about
half of their normal reading speed.
Consistent with previous work, the fast thinkers reported that they were
in a better mood after reading than the slow thinkers.
After reading, everyone was asked to perform the Balloon
Analog Risk Task (BART). In the BART,
people see a balloon on a computer screen.
They can inflate the balloon a bit more with each press of a button on
the keyboard. Each time they inflate the
balloon a bit more, they get 5-cents.
When they stop pumping up the balloon, they can keep whatever they
earn. However, if the balloon pops, they
lose the money they have accumulated.
Participants are not given any information about how many pumps they can
make on a given balloon before it will pop.
This task has been used in many previous studies to measure how much
risk someone is willing to take.
In this study, the fast thinkers pumped the balloon more
often than the slow thinkers, indicating that they were willing to take on
risk. On the positive side, this risky
behavior allows these participants to make more money on each balloon that they
did not pop. On the negative side, they
also popped more balloons than the slow thinkers.
A second study examined college student’s willingness to
engage in real-world risky behaviors. In
this study, the fast thinkers watched a movie in which the scene changed every
¾ of a second. The medium thinkers
watched a movie in which the scene changed every second and a half. The slow thinkers saw a movie whose scenes
changed every 3 seconds. The shots in
the film were all nature scenes that were matched for content across the three
versions of the film.
After watching the films, participants filled out a survey
in which they rated how likely they were to engage in a variety of behaviors
including things like playing drinking games, having unprotected sex, and
damaging public property. They also
rated how likely these behaviors were to get them in trouble.
The fast thinkers rated themselves as more likely to engage
in risky behavior in the future than the slow thinkers (with the medium
thinkers coming out in between). The
fast thinkers also thought that the risky behaviors were less likely to get
them in trouble than the slow thinkers.
So, fast thinking influences risk in part by decreasing how risky people
see these behaviors to be.
What does this mean?
This work suggests that if you find yourself in a situation
where you face some risk, it is probably a good idea to slow down. Counting to
10 before you go ahead and do something risky is not a bad idea. It may help you to be more effective at
deciding how dangerous an activity might be.
Of course, if you are the sort of person who never engages
in anything risky, and you want to take more risks than you do now, then this
work suggests you can do that by speeding up your thinking. A little fast thinking might make you more
willing to engage in things that your cautious nature might keep you from doing
otherwise.
