We present a new mechanism for encouraging risk taking within organizations that relies on the provision of decision insurance to managers. Since insurance increases the likelihood of free riding, we also introduce a technique that mitigates this moral hazard by automatically identifying the social network around the manager and using it as a monitoring group. We show that three possible regime...

Prior research has revealed racial disparities in health outcomes and more health-compromising behaviors, such as smoking and drug abuse. It has been suggested that discrimination may contribute to such disparities, but the mechanisms through which this occurs are not well understood. Here, we examined whether the experience of discrimination affects acute physiological stress responses and inc...

Positive mood can affect a person's tendency to gamble, possibly because positive mood fosters unrealistic optimism. At the same time, unexpected positive outcomes, often called prediction errors, influence mood. However, a linkage between positive prediction errors-the difference between expected and obtained outcomes-and consequent risk taking has yet to be demonstrated. Using a large data se...

background this quantitative explanatory study was designed to explain the relationship between hiv/aids risk-taking behaviors among african american women and their knowledge surrounding hiv/aids. more specifically, the research considers whether knowledge alone was sufficient to alter african-american women’s risk-taking behaviors regarding hiv/aids. objectives this study was designed to inve...

PURPOSE Social influence is prominent across the lifespan, but sensitivity to influence is especially high during adolescence and is often associated with increased risk taking. Such risk taking can have dire consequences. For example, in American adolescents, traffic-related crashes are leading causes of nonfatal injury and death. Neural measures may be especially useful in understanding the b...

Although immature cognitive control, subserved by late-developing prefrontal regions, has been proposed to underlie increased risk taking during adolescence, it remains unclear what patterns of PFC activation represent mature brain states: more or less activation? One challenge to drawing cogent conclusions from extant work stems from its reliance on single-time point neuroimaging and cross-sec...

According to the dual systems perspective, risk taking peaks during adolescence because activation of an early-maturing socioemotional-incentive processing system amplifies adolescents' affinity for exciting, pleasurable, and novel activities at a time when a still immature cognitive control system is not yet strong enough to consistently restrain potentially hazardous impulses. We review evide...

Evaluating the potential reward and risk associated with a choice of action plays an important role in everyday decision making. However, the details behind how reward and risk affect the decisions for actions remain unclear. The present study investigates the influence of reward and risk on a decision to make a speeded motor response. One hundred and ten college students performed a Speed-Rewa...