In the heat of the moment: The effect of impulsive and reflective states on sexual risk decisions

Why do people behave in ways that are bad for them in the long term? People are bad at resisting temptations at the expense of their long-term goals, they for instance have unprotected sex despite their long term goal to stay healthy. Impulsivity is often coined as reason for these kinds of behavior. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate why impulsiveness leads to riskier decisions. We first investigated the intuitively appealing, but unlikely, notion that people in impulsive states are less influenced by their long-term goals. Specifically, we found that sexual risk decisions of people in impulsive and reflective states are equally influenced by the importance of their long-term goals. We further showed that, when health goals are important, people in reflective states make riskier decisions as temptations become stronger, while decisions of people in impulsive states are not influenced by temptation strength. Subsequently, we investigated other possible reasons why impulsiveness leads to riskier decisions, namely difference in attention and perception. Specifically, we hypothesized and established, using eye-tracking, that people in impulsive states focus their attention on the most salient information, whereas people in reflective states distribute their attention. This attentional difference was found to affect sexual attractiveness judgments. Additionally, we found that people in impulsive states estimate the size of goal-relevant objects in biased ways. Specifically, sex-primed heterosexual men estimated a woman’s breasts as larger than men primed with a neutral stimulus. When primed with a sex goal, larger cup size, and thus sexual maturity, is goal congruent. Women showed the reverse effect, estimating cup size of a competitor as smaller is goal congruent, because for women another woman is competition, and estimating her cup size as smaller puts themselves in a more positive light (i.e., more sexually mature). That people in impulsive states are influenced by motivation, whereas people in reflective states are not, suggests that biased size estimation is a spontaneous process that promotes readiness for goal pursuit in people in impulsive states. Lastly, we tested whether changing a ‘simple’ environmental factor can possibly change the cognitive state people are in and possibly reduce risk taking. Based on widespread notions in our language, we hypothesized that temperature influences risk taking behavior. We found that imagery, such as ‘in the heat of the moment’, can be taken literally; people make riskier sexual decisions when temperatures are higher than when temperatures are lower.