The role of intelligence in decision‐making in early adolescence

Abstract

This study investigated the role of intelligence and its development across childhood in decision-making in adolescence (age 11 years). The sample was 12,514 children from the UK's Millennium Cohort Study, followed at ages 3, 5, 7, and 11 years. Decision-making (risk-taking, quality of decision-making, risk adjustment, deliberation time, and delay aversion) was measured with the Cambridge Gambling Task. Even after adjustment for confounding, intelligence was positively associated with risk adjustment and quality of decision-making in both boys and girls. Furthermore, in girls risk adjustment was related positively to IQ gains. Our findings suggest that there are important, substantively, associations between intelligence and adapting behaviour to risk at the cusp of adolescence, the period when the response to risk can shape life trajectories. Statement of Contribution What is already known on this subject In children, intelligence and decision-making, measured with gambling tasks, are inconsistently linked. This could be due to gambling tasks not separating risk-taking from contingency-learning. What the present study adds This study measured 11-year-olds' decision-making using a gambling task in which probabilities of different outcomes are presented explicitly. IQ was positively associated with risk adjustment and quality of decision-making. Also significant were IQ gains (for risk adjustment, only in girls). There are links between intelligence and adapting behaviour to statistical risk in children.

Resistance to cognitive biases: Longitudinal trajectories and associations with cognitive abilities and academic achievement across development

“…Finally, older youth have been shown to rely more heavily on base rate information than on individuating information (Kokis et al, 2002;Toplak et al, 2014), but other studies have shown mixed findings, depending on the domain under study (Jacobs & Potenza, 1991;Klaczynski, 2001b). Developmental differences on cognitive bias tasks have been primarily studied cross-sectionally, with relatively fewer longitudinal studies of judgment and decision making in developmental samples (Almy, Kuskowski, Malone, Myers, & Luciana, 2018;Flouri, Moulton, & Ploubidis, 2019). We predicted growth in RCB performance in our longitudinal developmental study.…”

The Roles of Fluid Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence in Affective Decision-Making During the Transition to Early Adolescence

“…For example, Li et al (2017) found that intellectually gifted children have better IGT performance than intellectually average children. A recent study of Flouri et al (2019) have found that children's IQ was substantively related to the quality of decision-making measured by another gambling task-Cambridge gambling task. Furthermore, researchers proposed that affective decisionmaking measured by the IGT demands inductive reasoning (important aspect of IQ) from participants through the trialand-error process of IGT (Busemeyer and Townsend, 1993).…”

“…For example, gifted children outperformed their average peers in regards of decision-making strategies and speed, which suggests that IQ can predict the affective decision-making ability of children and early adolescents ( Li et al, 2017 ). Another study ( Flouri et al, 2019 ) with over 12,000 participants found that intelligence was substantively associated with the risk adjustment and quality of decision-making measured by the performance of Cambridge Gambling Task in early adolescence (aged 11). By comparing the different findings of existing papers in IGT, we believe that the inconsistent results are due to different choice of indices.…”

Untitled

“…Интеллектуальные способности изучаются отечественными психологами в связи с одаренностью человека (Валуева и др., 2015; Григорьев и др., 2017), продуктивностью в разных видах и типах деятельности (Денисенкова, Выроцкова, 2015;Morosanova et al, 2015;Белова, Смирнова, 2015). В зарубежных исследованиях можно выделить две группы исследований интеллектуальных способностей, связанных с изучением их роли в академических достижениях (Freedberg et al, 2019;Mammadov et al, 2018;Tao, Jiannong, 2018) и развитии личности в разные возрастные периоды (Flouri et al, 2019;Kätlin, René, 2019).…”