Get the latest tech news
Surprising sounds could cause riskier decision-making
Yale researchers discovered that hearing an unexpected sound just before making a decision led people to make riskier choices.
A new Yale study shows that when other factors wholly unrelated to the decision at hand — such as an unexpected sound — trigger these dopamine bursts it can lead to riskier decision-making. “Many of us might have the intuition that hearing an unexpected sound would be distracting, that it might lead to errors or a loss of focus,” said Robb Rutledge, an assistant professor of psychology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and senior author of the study. In a series of seven different experiments, the researchers tested the idea by assigning 1,600 people a task wherein they had to choose between a safe and a risky option that offered varying amounts of points.
Or read this on Hacker News
