The Impact Of Ego-depletion On Risk Decision Making In College Students

Risk decision making is pretty important to our daily lives.At present,risk decision making has become a remarkable research focus in the field of Economics and Psychology.Relevant studies indicated that ego-deletion can impact risk decision making.Ego deletion is caused by the waste of self-control resources.With the study of risk decision making going further,available research have come to two totally different conclusions:1.Ego-depletion increases risk making.2.Ego-depletion decreases risk making.Besides,risk decision making is influenced by framework as well.Framing effect refers to the alteration of decision brought by different formats to the same option.Many studies have confirmed the existence of framing effect in risk decision making.But the discussion of the impact of the two variables together with ego depletion and framing effect on risk decision making is few,thus we have no specific conclusion then we need to detect it further.Therefore,this study will use experimental methods to explore the effects of ego-depletion and frame on risk decision making from a perspective of psychology.This study is divided into two experimental studies:Experiment 1 aims to test the influence of ego depletion on risk decision making.44 college students participated in the experiment.In the experiment,the impact brought by emotion.personality and gender are excluded,we used Stroop task to deplete participants' self control resources,and BART task to measure their risk making tendency.The result shows us:the number of exploding balloons and click times to other balloons in high depletion groups is significantly higher than low depletion group.Experiment 2 investigates ego-depletion and frames on risk decision-making including high/low depletion groups and benefit/depletion frame.48 college students participated in the experiment.In this experiment we used scale to measure their risk score under different frames.The results show the risk score in high depletion groups is significantly higher than low depletion group,and the risk score in benefit frame is significantly lower than in depletion frame.We can find both ego depletion and framework can impact risk decision making from results above:ego depletion increases individual's risk taking tendency;people preferred be conservative in benefit frame,but take a risk in depletion frame;but there exists no significant interaction effect between ego depletion and framework.This study explored the impact of ego-depletion and frame on risk decision making in college students by two experiments.Future research can be done on natural scenes to enhance ecological validity of the experiment.Besides,with the help of technology of ERP and fMRI,we may explore the neural mechanism of risk decision making,thereby enriching the risk decision making area.