Behavioral and Brain Functions

Background: In the growing body of literature on economic decision making, the main focus has typically been on explaining aggregate behavior, with little interest in individual differences despite considerable between-subject variability in decision responses. In this study, we were interested in asking to what degree individual differences in fundamental psychological processes can mediate economic decision-making behavior. Methods: Specifically, we studied a personality dimension that may influence economic decisionmaking, the Behavioral Activation System, (BAS) which is composed of three components: Reward Responsiveness, Drive, and Fun Seeking. In order to assess economic decision making, we utilized two commonly-used tasks, the Ultimatum Game and Dictator Game. Individual differences in BAS were measured by completion of the BIS/BAS Scales, and correlations between the BAS scales and monetary offers made in the two tasks were computed. Results: We found that higher scores on BAS Drive and on BAS Reward Responsiveness were associated with a pattern of higher offers on the Ultimatum Game, lower offers on the Dictator Game, and a correspondingly larger discrepancy between Ultimatum Game and Dictator Game offers. Conclusion: These findings are consistent with an interpretation that high scores on Drive and Reward Responsiveness are associated with a strategy that first seeks to maximize the likelihood of reward, and then to maximize the amount of reward. More generally, these results suggest that there are additional factors other than empathy, fairness and selfishness that contribute to strategic decision-making. Background For many centuries theoreticians have attempted to build accurate models of how people make judgments, decisions, and choices. To endeavor to answer these important questions about decision-making behavior, researchers from a wide variety of fields have used many different approaches and methods, though for many years this area of interest has been the purview of economists and mathematicians. The resulting mathematical models, such as the family of Expected Utility models [1], were initially proposed as primarily prescriptive, that is, modeling how decisions should be made. However, these models were also taken as good approximations of how people actually make judgments and decisions. Published: 18 October 2006 Behavioral and Brain Functions 2006, 2:35 doi:10.1186/1744-9081-2-35 Received: 14 July 2006 Accepted: 18 October 2006 This article is available from: http://www.behavioralandbrainfunctions.com/content/2/1/35 © 2006 Scheres and Sanfey; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Behavioral and Brain Functions 2006, 2:35 http://www.behavioralandbrainfunctions.com/content/2/1/35