| Popis: |
The outbreak of Covid-19, and the imposed lockdown measures, expose large parts of the global population to uncertainty in many domains: financial stability, housing, health, social and ethical dimensions. To aid the development of policies around such decisions, we need to understand fundamental aspects of decision-making, such as the willingness to take risks (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). Understanding risk tolerance has previously shown to be crucial for predicting and changing behaviour across domains, including health and safety, finance and ethical behaviours (Lejuez et al., 2002). As new decisions appear before us, generalizable findings thus rely on understanding such fundamental aspects under the current Covid-19-related circumstances. We are using these extraordinary circumstances to test for effects of everyday time perception of population-level risk taking. Previous research by Sanders & Jenkins (2016) showed risk tolerance fluctuations over the days of the week in a laboratory study which were akin to fluctuations in polling data ahead of Scottish independence and decisions to leave the European union, occurrences of bank robberies and active shootings (Sanders & Jenkins, revise and resubmit with Psychological Science), complex reflective decision making in chess outcomes (Jenkins & Sanders, in preparation). One explanation for these fluctuations is that the social rhythms of the weekly cycle (e.g. when we socialise, work or sleep) cause for subtle fluctuations in mood, which a substantial body of literature links to risk taking. We currently have a unique opportunity to test the relationship between the effects of social structure and risk taking: lockdown is as close to an experimental manipulation of the social effect of the weekly cycle as one can get. The cycle is expected to be unusually subdued with substantial parts of the population either working from home or being laid off or furloughed |
