Risk‐Taking Tendencies in Prisoners and Nonprisoners

Does Gender Matter

Dados Bibliográficos

ID12166366
AutoresSzymon Wichary (0000-0002-0790-2977, University of Social Sciences and Humanities Warsaw Poland, autor correspondente), Thorsten Pachur (0000-0001-6391-4107, Max Planck Institute for Human Development Berlin Germany), Mengduo Li (University of Social Sciences and Humanities Warsaw Poland)
Ano2015
Volume28
Fascículo5
Páginas504-514
Data de publicação2015-03-10
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of Behavioral Decision Making (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0894-3257 • E-ISSN: 1099-0771
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1002/bdm.1866
OpenAlexW1517911606
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas4
Referências citadas52

Several investigations have found that prisoners are more likely than nonprisoners to engage in risky behavior, which may contribute to their propensity to commit criminal offenses. However, this research has been limited by an almost exclusive focus on male samples. Given the established link between risk taking and gender, it is thus unclear how findings on the risk‐taking propensities of prisoners also hold in women. The present study uses both a self‐report questionnaire (Domain‐Specific Risk Taking scale, DOSPERT) and a behavioral task (Balloon Analogue Risk Task, BART) to investigate risk‐taking tendencies in a Chinese prisoner group and a nonprisoner control group with balanced gender proportions. Across both genders, prisoners both indicated a higher risk‐taking tendency on the DOSPERT and showed more risk‐taking behavior on the BART than did nonprisoners. Importantly, the differences were considerably more pronounced in women than in men. Relative to nonprisoners, gender differences in risk taking were substantially smaller, or even reversed, in prisoners. Computational modeling of respondents' behavior in the BART revealed that the prisoners had higher reward sensitivity and lower response consistency than the nonprisoners; these differences were again more pronounced among women. Our results suggest that previous studies based primarily on male prisoners may have underestimated differences in risk taking between prisoners and nonprisoners, and that female prisoners may represent an even more extreme subpopulation than male prisoners. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Commit · Consistency (knowledge bases · Task (project management · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Psychology · Psychopathy, Forensic Psychiatry, Sexual Offending · Social Psychology