Science Sunday: Gut Reaction

I recently read a 2006 paper titled "Visceral Influences on Risk-Taking Behavior." In spite of it's problems this paper uses some great language. Take for example this opening paragraph from the introduction:

"People often do things that they almost immediately regret. Would-be dieters succumb to the lure of forsworn foods, only to curse their weak wills once their hunger (or the food) is gone. Unfaithful spouses live wracked with guilt after an impulsive sexual dalliance, only to repeat the cycle again and again, each time as bewildered as the last by the inconsistency between the strength of their resolve in the company of their families and the crumbling of this resolve in the presence of a willing lover." (Ditto, et al., 2006)

Forsworn. Dalliance. These aren't words that get bandied about normally. The paper also sports a comprehensive literature review of "failures of will" dating back to the 4th century BCE and the Aristotelian akrasia, where a person knowingly does something wrong. Economists have also been baffled about our ability to act against our own self-interest, and folks like Larry Winget make a career telling us about it. But why do people behave this way?

The authors of this paper attribute it to Visceral Factors. According to Loewenstein (1996) Visceral Factors are motivational states such as hunger, thirst, pain, and sexual desire. In this paper the authors looked at hunger and sexual desire and how exposure to them led participants to make irrational or impulsive decisions. (Surprised yet?)

Chocolate chiopcookie

In the first experiment participants wagered spending more time in the lab doing experiments  vs. chocolate chip cookies. One group had the cookies described to them, but the other got to see and smell the cookies. The smellers were the fellers ones more likely to wager time, even when told they didn't have good odds. The idea being that the visceral hunger response led to the impulsive, riskier decision. Side note: Imagine how awesome it would be to be the researcher; tempting hapless volunteers with delicious cookies but forcing them to wager time just in the hopes of getting a taste.

French Kiss

The second experiment involved a vignette where a young couple begins to make out and prepare to have sex, and then realize they have no condom. In the visceral condition this was presented as a video, in the non-visceral condition this was presented in a passage that participants would read. Then participants were asked to respond as if they were in that situation how likely they would be to have sex even without a condom. Again the idea is that the stronger visceral response to viewing the soft-core video was the reason that group was more likely to choose to engage in risky sexual behavior.

All of this is great, and as I said I thought the paper has great use of language in science writing. But I'm not so sure that it is just viscera, and not just stronger stimuli. In general Bigger Stimuli = Bigger Response. The response here being desire for the stimuli. What I'm saying is, you want the cookies you smell more because the smell is more stimulating in general, not just because it made your tummy rumble. So in order to control for the impact of the stimuli, you would have to find a way to use the same stimuli but have it effect the viscera of only some participants. I think you could do this with a group of quadriplegic participants, right? I mean they have viscera but they can't sense them. Or maybe easier you could have a hungry and full groups when presented with cookies, but that I think would still be looking at motivation, not viscera exclusively. But hey, I don't have to have the solution, just identify the problem.

Ditto, P., Pizarro, D., Epstein, E., Jacobson, J., & MacDonald, T. (2006). Visceral influences on risk-taking behavior Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 19 (2), 99-113 DOI: 10.1002/bdm.520