Control Alters Risk-Taking: The Motivating Impact of Action-Effectiveness in Different Risk Contexts

Risk-taking is traditionally explained through outcome-value expectancy models. Recently, however, it has been demonstrated that immediate versus delayed feedback increases risk-taking independently of expected value. The current work takes a novel approach to investigate behavioral motivation in different risk-taking contexts, building on recent progress in identifying the reinforcing impact of actioneffectiveness. Participants performed 1 of 2 different versions of the Balloon Analogue Risk task (BART) in which an action increases (Experiment 1 and 2) or decreases (Experiment 3) the risk of losing real money. Importantly, action-effectiveness was subtly manipulated. In 3 experiments, we found that action-effectiveness reinforces action tendency in both risk-taking contexts. In addition, the reinforcing effect was independent of participants’ explicit knowledge regarding the action-effectiveness manipulation and their deliberate expectancy-based risk strategy. Overall, the findings strongly suggest that action-effectiveness motivates action and not risk-taking per SE Accordingly, the findings shed light on the BART suggesting that in this task, higher scores could be due to higher motivation for action and not necessarily to more risk-taking