Self-other Difference In Risk Decision Making: An Experimental Study

In recent years,domain-specific risky activities or attitudes were received lots of notices by researcher.Specifically,individuals' degree of risk taking was highly domain-specific,i.e.not consistently risk-averse or consistently risk seeking across all content domains.Currently,several psychometric scales to assess risk attitude in different risk domains were developed with different versions,which also confirmed this fundamental phenomenon.Meanwhile,several recent studies about self-other differences in risk decision making found that individuals in different risk decision tasks showed inconsistent self-other differences in decision making.However,this difference of risk decision tasks and domain-specific risky attitudes in essence were highly relevant.In this study,on the basis of the above link,we firstly reviewed related research progress about risk decision-making,self-other differences in decision making.Then,we investigated self-other differences in different risk decision domains by subdividing others into different types and interpreted these results based on the social value theory.In this study,we designed three experiments to explore of self-others difference in different risk decision domains.In study 1,monetary task,romantic relationship task and physical safety task were selected to investigate self-other difference toward individuals' risk preference when participants were asked to make decision for oneself and for one friend.From the nature of the others,study 2 was divided into two experiments with monetary task divided into loss and gain task to investigate self-other difference toward individuals' risk preference.In study 2a,participants were asked to make decision for themselves,decision for an intimate friend and for a new friend operated by IOS.In study 2b,participants were asked to make decision for themselves,decision for a similar friend and for a dissimilar friend operated by new materials.In study 3,from the number of the others,participants were asked to make decision for themselves,decision for one friend and for five friends to investigate self-other difference toward individuals' risk preference.At the same time,according to the fact that self-interest was involved or not,decision for five friends was divided into two types.Through data analysis,the conclusions were as followed:Firstly,individuals' risk attitude is not consistent in different domains which confirmed domain-specific risk altitude.In particular,individuals' risk preference in monetary loss task tended to be highest,the following was in romantic relationship task and monetary gain task,and the last one was in physical safety task.The above results confirmed the risk decision of domain specificity.In addition,compared to the women,man tended to be more risk-taking.Secondly,in general,in addition to monetary loss task,the self-other difference toward individuals' risk preference was found in other three fields.However,this difference was inconsistent among the above three domains.No self-other difference was found between different single people,but self-other difference was found between single and multiple others.Lastly,without considering decision making for several others involving self-interest,social value theory can basically explain the results of self-other differences in risk decision making.