Project Details
Projekt
Modeling risk perception and risk taking in dynamic situations
Applicant
Professor Dr. Ronald Hübner
Subject Area
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Term
from 2016 to 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 273711585
The goal of this project is to investigate basic mechanisms and processes of risk perception and risk-taking behavior. Although there is already much research in this area, mainly static tasks have been applied. These tasks, however, do not reflect the fact that risky real-life decisions usually lead to conditions that change the risk for further decisions. An interesting question therefore is, to what extent decision makers are able to detect these changes and to take them into account. To answer this and related questions, the present project focusses on basic dynamic aspects of risky behavior. Recently, several dynamic tasks have been developed that are well suited for achieving this goal. One is the Columbia Card Task (CCT), where several sequential risky decisions have to be made, each of which modifies the risk for the subsequent decision. The CCT allows a detailed investigation of the Preparedness-Exposure-Coping (PEC) cycle, which is the main topic of the research unit. The focus of this project is the dynamics of sequential decisions. The corresponding performance will not only be investigated experimentally, but also modeled with static as well as dynamic models. Of further interest is the dynamics within decisions. That is, it will be examined how and when different types of information are taken into account during the decision process and are used for the evaluation of the different options. These issues will also be analyzed by modeling decision performance with diffusion models. Overall, 8 experiments are planned, of which some are concerned with the investigation of basic properties of dynamic tasks and corresponding risky decisions. In other experiments it will be tested how performance in dynamic tasks differ to that in static tasks. The applicability of the developed concepts and models, e.g. in clinical contexts, will be tested in cooperation with other sub-projects.
DFG Programme
Research Units
