Measuring volunteers for exciting psychology experiments with the Sensation-Seeking Scale

The sensation-seeking motive was first operationalized by Zuckerman, Kolin, Price, and Zoob (1964) with the development of the Sensation-Seeking Scale (SSS). One area of applied research in which the SSS has been used is the study of volunteering. In this area, evidence suggests that high-sensation seekers volunteer for exciting activities more often than low-sensation seekers, but not for unexciting activities. However, a problem with this research is that no empirical data has been obtained related to the subject's belief of the exciting nature of the activities. In this study, college students were given the most recent form of the SSS and were asked to volunteer for either or both of two studies. SSS scores were higher, p less than .05, for volunteers than for nonvolunteers for a study that subjects rated as exciting, but did not differ for a study that subjects rated as unexciting. This demonstrates that volunteers for exciting studies, but not volunteers for unexciting studies, tend to be higher sensation seekers than nonvolunteers.