Neural mediation of greed personality trait on economic risk-taking

  1. Weiwei Li
  2. Haixia Wang
  3. Xiaofei Xie
  4. Jian Li  Is a corresponding author
  1. Peking University, China
  2. Jinan University, China

Abstract

Dispositional greed, characterized by the insatiable hunger for more and the dissatisfaction for not having enough, has often been associated with heightened impulsivity and excessive risk-taking. Despite its far-reaching implications in social science and economics, however, the exact neural mechanisms of how greed personality influences risk-taking are still ill understood. In the present study, we showed the correlation between subjects' greed personality trait (GPT) scores and risk-taking was selectively mediated by individual's loss aversion, but not risk attitude. In addition, our neuroimaging results indicated that gain and loss prospects were jointly represented in the activities of the ventral striatum and medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC). Furthermore, mOFC responses also encoded the neural loss aversion signal and mediated the association between individual differences in GPT scores and behavioral loss aversion. Our findings provide a basis for understanding the specific neural mechanisms that mediates the effect of greed personality trait on risk-taking behaviors.

Data availability

All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files. Source data files have been provided in https://osf.io/rpve7/

The following data sets were generated
    1. Li W
    (2019) Neural mediation of greed personality trait on economic risk-taking
    Open Science Framework, doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/RPVE7.

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Weiwei Li

    Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing, China
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  2. Haixia Wang

    School of Management, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  3. Xiaofei Xie

    School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  4. Jian Li

    School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China
    For correspondence
    leekin@gmail.com
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-3941-2622

Funding

National Natural Science Foundation of China (31421003)

  • Jian Li

Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China (2015CB559200)

  • Jian Li

National Natural Science Foundation of China (31371019)

  • Jian Li

The funders had no role in study design, data collection, and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: Human subjects: All participants provided written informed consent. Study procedures were reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee at Peking University (2017-11-01).

Reviewing Editor

  1. Thorsten Kahnt, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, United States

Version history

  1. Received: January 14, 2019
  2. Accepted: April 27, 2019
  3. Accepted Manuscript published: April 29, 2019 (version 1)
  4. Version of Record published: May 8, 2019 (version 2)

Copyright

© 2019, Li et al.

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

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  1. Weiwei Li
  2. Haixia Wang
  3. Xiaofei Xie
  4. Jian Li
(2019)
Neural mediation of greed personality trait on economic risk-taking
eLife 8:e45093.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.45093

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