Contextual influences on risk preferences

Tomas Folke is interested in how to use behavioural science and statistics to improve the lives of disadvantaged people. He is currently pursuing these goals by researching behaviour and decision-making in the context of mental health care reform in Lebanon as a post-doc at the University of Cambridge, and by designing, analysing and visualising research for Ground Truth Solutions, an NGO that tries to make the humanitarian system more responsive to the people it purports to serve.  Tomas has a PhD in Psychology from the University of Cambridge.

Project description

One of the most robust findings in human decision-making research is that people tend to be more risk-seeking in the context of avoiding losses than they are when maximising gains. Recent research suggests that risk preferences for gains and losses are completely dissociated, so you don’t learn anything about a person’s risk preferences for losses by observing how they behave with gains, and vice-versa. Work from my lab expanded this finding as we discovered interventions could have a positive effect on risk preference for gains, but no effect for losses, and vice-versa. For example, providing more information had the greatest impact on avoiding losses, but teaching someone how to reason about risk and probability best helped them maximise gains. The current project will build on this work by looking at how a different set of interventions influence risk-taking for gains and losses, and whether there are any cross-cultural differences in these effects.