Neural mediation of greed personality trait on economic risk-taking

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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.

https://osf.io/rpve7/

Article and author information

Author details

Weiwei Li

Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing, China

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Haixia Wang

School of Management, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Xiaofei Xie

School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
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.

"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).

Copyright

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.