 On the priming of risk preferences: The role of fear and general affectDespoina Alempaki, Chris Starmer and Fabio Tufano Journal of Economic Psychology, 2019, vol. 75, issue PA Abstract: Priming is an established tool in psychology for investigating aspects of cognitive processes underlying decision making and is increasingly applied in economics. We report a systematic attempt to test the reproducibility and generalisability of priming effects on risk attitudes in a more diverse population than professionals and students, when priming using either a positive or a negative experience. We further test fear as the causal mechanism underlying countercyclical risk aversion. Across a series of experiments with a total sample of over 1900 participants, we are unable to find any systematic effect of priming on risk preferences. Moreover, our results challenge the role of fear as the mechanism underlying countercyclical risk aversion; we find evidence of an impact of general affect such that the better our participants feel, the more risk they take. Keywords: Priming; Risk preferences; Replication; Emotions; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:75:y:2019:i:pa:s0167487018302940 DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2018.12.011 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier |
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