Player-spectator discrepancies on risk preference during decision making

Risk preference during decision making depends not only on the potential risk and profits but also on the roles taken in the current task. Those who perform tasks are more risk-seeking than those who only watch. Given the prominent effect of experiencing the task, the player-spectator discrepancies are supposed to arise in the experiencing phase instead of the choosing phase. In the present study, the authors separated the experiencing role and the choosing role through a stylus maze task in which participants first performed in pairs-one as the player and the other as the spectator-and then chose from two rewarding options for themselves or their partners. The findings show that the experience as players induced a risk-seeking tendency in decision making, which suggests that it was the experiencing role, rather than the choosing role, that caused the difference of risk preference, at least for financially motivated groups and under similar task conditions.