This study investigated risk-taking behaviours among 244 first year students (Male=52 and Female=192). The risk-taking behaviours of the students were grouped into Risky and Violent Behaviour, Tobacco Use, Alcohol and Drug Use, Risky Sexual Behaviour and Unhealthy Dietary Behaviour subscales. Statistically significant correlations were found among all the risk-taking behaviour subscales other than Unhealthy Dietary Behaviours, which did not correlate with the other risky behaviours. Statistical significant sex differences were found regarding risk-taking behaviour that implicated males as higher risk-takers than females.

This research was based on the premise that psychological research on risk-taking behaviour has emphasized a one-dimensional model of instrumentality and cognitive functioning derived from male experience. The central research question "How do women experience risk-taking?" was investigated by analyzing definitions and examples of personal risk described by 44 women, and by comparing relationships between subgroups assigned by occupation and by sex-role orientation. The findings indicated that women experienced risk-taking that spanned both dimensions of affiliation (connection to others) and instrumentality (attainment of personal goals). A new definition of risk-taking was proposed that incorporated elements of uncertainty, emotional involvement, loss, and a process of change. Women in traditional occupations described a similar number of affiliative and instrumental risks, while women in non-traditional occupations emphasized instrumental risks. It was observed that the opportunity and demand for risk-taking appeared related to social context and work activity. Significant differences were also found between women in traditional and non-traditional occupations with respect to sex-role orientation (from the Bern Sex-Role Inventory), employment status, income level, and number of children. No differences were found between sub-groups designated by occupation and by sex-role orientation with respect to estimates of risk-taking tendency from a self-estimate scale and the Choice Dilemmas Questionnaire. The results supported a critique of the Choice Dilemmas Questionnaire, citing an emphasis on instrumental and hypothetical risk-taking. Participants also reported that the CDQ was not relevant to their lives. The feminist approach encouraged active participation and evaluation by the women in the study. As a result, participants reported an increased understanding of themselves and of the process of risk-taking. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

There has been a vast amount of research done in the fields of Entrepreneurship and Risk Taking. There is, however, very little literature regarding the relationship between Risk Taking and Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE). This study attempts to understand that relationship whilst exploring the impact of Risk Propensity on Corporate Entrepreneurship with the intention of questioning current CE frameworks. The objective was to establish criteria to increase CE in the business environment. A bespoke questionnaire was sent out to determine both the individual Risk Propensity of the respondents and their perception of CE within their organisation. The elements of the questionnaire were based on well-known instruments available in literature. The variables used to explore the data further were based on the demographic information supplied by the respondents. The main objective of the study was to determine the relationship between Risk Propensity and CE with the secondary objectives looking to explore the variation in both Risk Propensity and CE across the established variables. The findings indicate little or no relationship between Risk Propensity and CE whilst the results from the variable analysis highlight the importance of Organisational Boundaries as a factor of CE. A framework is then proposed synthesising the results of the analysis before concluding with recommendations for future research. / Dissertation (MBA)-University of Pretoria, 2014. / lmgibs2015 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted

When a choice model fails, the standard economics exercise is to weaken one assumption at a time to study what has changed. This is often accompanied by the understanding that future work will relax multiple assumptions simultaneously in order to explain actual behavior. This dissertation does exactly that, and by studying seemingly independent behavioral anomalies as related to one another we obtain new insights about why behavior departs from standard models. Chapter 1 studies how violations of structural assumptions like expected utility and exponential discounting can be connected to reference dependent preferences with set-dependent reference points, even if behavior conforms with these assumptions when the reference is fixed. This is done with the introduction of a unified framework under which both general rationality (WARP) and domain-specific structural postulates (e.g., Independence for risk preference, Stationarity for time preference) are jointly relaxed using a systematic reference dependence approach. The framework allows us to study risk, time, and social preferences collectively, where behavioral departures from WARP and structural postulates are explained by a common source—changing preferences due to reference dependence. In our setting, reference points are given by a linear order that captures the relevance of each alternative in becoming the reference point and affecting preferences. In turn, they determine the domain-specific preference parameters for the underlying choice problem (e.g., utility functions for risk, discount factors for time). Chapter 2, a joint work with Silvio Ravaioli, conducts an empirical test for one of the models in Chapter 1. It studies how the introduction of a very safe or very risky option affects risk attitude. In a laboratory experiment, we find that adding safer options increases displayed risk aversion, and it does so even when the added options are not chosen. This finding is robust across participants and treatments (e.g., degenerate and non-degenerate safe options). By contrast, we find that the addition of risky options does not result in a detectable change in risk attitude. Our results are in line with Chapter 1’s Avoidable Risk Expected Utility model. Chapter 3 studies choices over time, which allows us to study anomalies “at a given time” and “across time” as related to one another. This is achieved by studying how past choices affect future choices in the framework of attention. Limited attention has been proposed as an explanation for the failure of “rationality”, where better options are not chosen because the decision maker has failed to consider them. We investigate this idea in a setting where (1) the observable are sequences of choices and (2) the decision makers are aware of the alternatives they chose in the past when they face future choice sets. This provides a link between two kinds of rationality violations: those that occur in a cross section of one-shot decisions and those that occur within a sequence of realized choices. Unlike the former, the frequency of the latter is naturally bounded, and their occurrence helps pin down preferences whenever a standard model of limited attention cannot.

No description available.

published_or_final_version / Psychiatry / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Community Medicine / Master / Master of Public Health

published_or_final_version / Social Work and Social Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

The proposed study examined the role of anxiety and risk-taking in driving performance in adolescents. In addition to examining the sample as a whole, gender differences were assessed given earlier reports from our laboratory and others indicating that males and females differ with respect to risky behaviors to driving performance and anxiety. Adolescents' subjective and physiological responses to a driving simulator task were assessed. Anxiety was measured via self report and salivary cortisol. Participants provided a baseline saliva sample and 3 post-task samples for cortisol analysis. Subjective anxiety scores were obtained at both baseline and following the driving stressor. Information concerning impulsivity, as well as other psychological constructs was also collected at baseline. Unlike the pilot study, there were no relationships (with or without respect to gender) between salivary cortisol and both self-reported anxiety (state and trait) or impulsively measures for this sample. These results suggest that this group of adolescents may not have been anxious about the driving task. This discrepancy may stem from error introduced by the smaller sample size obtained from the initial findings or to other factors remaining outside the parameters of the current study. The task did, however, induce a slight hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis response indicating some physiological arousal. Males had significantly higher cortisol levels at baseline than females and at time point 3 while approaching significance at time points 2 and 4. Females possessed significantly higher trait anxiety than males and all post task cortisol levels were positively correlated to age while time points 2 and 4 (with time point 3 approaching significance, p=0.09) were inversely correlated with Self Depreciation scores. Additionally, females had Persecutory Ideas scores that were also negatively correlated with cortisol at time points 3 and 4. For both the entire sample and males only, the correlation between post-task cortisol and driving performance was positive and approached significance (p=0.07 and p=0.08, respectively), suggesting that some HPA activation may be facilitative for successful driving task performance. Correlations between driving performance and psychological constructs were explored and discussed with and without respect to gender.

Humans exhibit a number of suboptimal behaviours in the wake of a loss. For example, gamblers often ‘chase' their losses in an attempt to break even. Similarly, investors tend to hold on to losing stocks too long in the hope that the declining share price might make a recovery. However, the neural mechanisms that instantiate such behaviour are poorly understood. I begin the introductory chapter with a basic historical overview of fundamental economic concepts, interleaving intersecting ideas from psychology and neuroscience. This leads to a more in-depth exploration of the notion that loss-related behavioural biases might provide insight into the neural mechanisms that underlie risky choice. From this, I argue that rats represent a viable animal model of risky decision- making for neuroeconomic research. The original research presented in Chapters 2 – 5 pave the way toward advancing our current understanding of loss-related biases in behaviour with rat models of risky decision-making. By employing insight from psychology and economics, I developed two models of rat behaviour that can be used to study the neural substrates of loss valuation. I presented the experimental paradigms in Chapters 2 and 5, while demonstrating novel loss-related correlations between the midbrain dopamine system and observed loss behaviour in Chapters 3 and 4. The results presented in Chapter 5 demonstrate that rats are capable of producing behavioural patterns akin to loss aversion and the disposition effect. This work has also highlighted a number of areas for future research. In Chapter 6, I explore potential theoretical implications of the results discussed in previous chapters. In summary, this thesis uses experimental risky decision-making tasks in rats to advance our current knowledge of the ways in which concepts such as loss aversion critically influence our internal representation of value.