A Bayesian method for measuring risk propensity in the Balloon Analogue Risk Task

The Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) is widely-used to measure risk propensity in theoretical, clinical, and applied research. In the task, people choose either to pump a balloon to increase its value at the risk of the balloon bursting and losing all value, or to bank the current value of the balloon. Risk propensity is most commonly measured as the average number of pumps on trials for which the balloon does not burst. Burst trials are excluded because they necessarily underestimate the number of pumps people intended to make. However, their exclusion discards relevant information about people's risk propensity. A better measure of risk propensity uses the statistical method of censoring to incorporate all of the trials. We develop a new Bayesian method, based on censoring, for measuring both risk propensity and behavioral consistency in the BART. Through applications to previous data we demonstrate how the method can be extended to consider the correlation of risk propensity with external measures, and to compare differences in risk propensity between groups. We provide implementations of all of these methods in R, MATLAB, and the GUI-based statistical software JASP.

Improving the measurement of prosociality through aggregation of game behavior

Prior research has found that people's choices in economic games are often only modestly related to their prosocial personality traits and to mundane prosocial behaviors. The present article reviews the recent literature showing that the strength of these relationships depends on the level of aggregation. Specifically, we demonstrate an increase in behavioral consistency after horizontal aggregation (across multiple game types), vertical aggregation (across multiple game variants), and a combination thereof. Moreover, we show that aggregation increases the magnitude of the relationships of game behavior with prosocial personality and mundane prosocial behavior. These findings illustrate that economic games can genuinely capture a core facet of human prosociality - but that their capacity for doing so is greater when multiple game behaviors are considered.

The dispositional basis of human prosociality

Individual differences in prosocial behavior have been consistently observed in a variety of contexts. Here, we summarize and critically discuss recent developments in two research agendas on the dispositional basis of human prosociality: a personality approach, proposing a variety of trait concepts and corresponding measures to predict prosocial behavior in different situations; and a behavioral consistency approach, testing for consistency in prosocial behaviors and its underlying latent disposition(s) across situations. Drawing on different properties of situations (so-called situational affordances), we outline a theoretical framework that can help integrate these so far hardly connected research agendas. We also point out limitations of prior research, such as a lack of theory, and provide suggestions on how to overcome them.