Speeding up your rate of thought makes you more accept more
risk. Are you feeling lucky? Pop quiz: do you consider yourself
a fast thinker or a slow thinker? Time's up! If you took less
than a second to answer that, you might be more of a risk-taker.
That's according to new research (via Psychology Today) from a
team of Princeton scientists who thought there might be a causal
relationship between the speed of a person's thought and their
willingness to embrace dangerous behavior, such as illegal drug
use and unprotected sex. The researchers, Emily Pronin and Jesse
Chandler, ran two tests in a study that appeared this month in
Psychological Science. Participants were divided into two
groups. One group was primed by being asked to read a set of
trivia statements at twice their normal reading speed, while
members of the other group were asked to read the same
statements at half-speed. All the participants were then told to
play a standard game that's used to determine risk acceptance.
Called the Balloon Analog R