The influence of mortality and socioeconomic status on risk and delayed rewards: a replication with British participants

Abstract

Here, we report three attempts to replicate a finding from an influential psychological study (Griskevicius et al., 2011b). The original study found interactions between childhood SES and experimental mortality-priming condition in predicting risk acceptance and delay discounting outcomes. The original study used US student samples. We used British university students (replication 1) and British online samples (replications 2 and 3) with a modified version of the original priming material, which was tailored to make it more credible to a British audience. We did not replicate the interaction between childhood SES and mortality-priming condition in any of our three experiments. The only consistent trend of note was an interaction between sex and priming condition for delay discounting. We note that psychological priming effects are considered fragile and often fail to replicate. Our failure to replicate the original finding could be due to demographic differences in study participants, alterations made to the prime, or other study limitations. However, it is also possible that the previously reported interaction is not a robust or generalizable finding.

A marker of biological ageing predicts adult risk preference in European starlings, Sturnus vulgaris

“…In humans, the prevailing finding has been for greater risk aversion with chronological ageing (Harbaugh et al 2002; Deakin et al 2004; Dohmen and Falk 2010; Mohr et al 2010; Boyle et al 2011; Rutledge et al 2016; although see Cavanagh et al 2012; Pachur et al 2017), a pattern similar to that in our starlings in respect of our biomarker of biological ageing. Increased risk aversion was also observed in human experimental participants primed to perceive greater extrinsic mortality risk, and therefore potentially perceive lowered life expectancy (Pepper et al 2017). However, a single study in humans examining the association between risk preference and telomeres found greater risk proneness in a stock investment task to be associated with shorter telomere length (Yim et al 2016).…”

The effects of low socioeconomic status on decision-making processes

“…To the extent that not having enough money to meet one's needs triggers this basic sense of resource scarcity, it should cause regulatory and cognitive priorities to shift toward the most immediate financial concerns, at the cost of long-term economic outcomes. This logic can help us make sense of the finding that the lower one's SES, the more likely one is to exhibit signs of apparent failures in self-regulation, such as impulsivity, future discounting, and poor planfulness (24) (1), and that reminders of economic scarcity lead to present-biased financial decisions among those who grew up in families experiencing financial strain (25) (though see (26)). On this account, it is not that early life or adult exposure to adversity diminishes self-regulatory capacity (8,27), but that it shifts regulatory priorities toward meeting short-term goals (see (28)(29)(30)(31)).…”

Hunger and socioeconomic background additively predict impulsivity in humans

“…Our search for interactive influences is motivated by previous research. For example, Nettle and Bateson (2017) found that the negative health effects of low adult socioeconomic position were more marked if individuals had experienced childhood deprivation; and Griskevicius et al (2011) found that a current cue of environmental adversity had different effects on the impulsivity of people who had experienced different levels of childhood deprivation (though see Pepper et al 2017).…”