Never mind losing the pound… still got the penny! The influence of trait greed on risky decision behavior in a mixed and gain only BART

Two different reasons to show risky behavior have been identified: Risk proneness and the lack of loss aversion. So far, the number of empirical studies investigating the influence of trait greed, anxiety, and age on risky decision behavior, differentiating between risk sensitivity and loss aversion, is very limited and inconsistent findings exist. The present study investigated this issue using variants of the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) in an online study. Risky decision-making behavior was then assessed by administering two versions of the BART, a gain only and a mixed gambling BART. A total of 54 male and 51 female subjects participated in the study. It could be shown that individuals with a high expression of the personality trait greed show an increased risky decision behavior due to an increased risk sensitivity and not due to a reduced loss aversion. This is partly in contrasts with previous findings in other tasks assessing risk sensitivity and loss aversion. These differences may be due to the changes of perception during the gain only task.No significant effect was found between the personality trait anxiety or age and risky decision-making behavior. This could be since no pathologically anxious subjects were used for the sample, or respectively due to an unbalanced distribution of age.