Many of our physical movements can be telltale signs of who we are as a person. In this study, scientists have revealed that how a person moves a computer mouse can be used to reveal how much of a risk-taker that person is. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“We could see the conflict people were feeling making the choice through their hand movements with the mouse,” said Paul Stillman, lead author of the study who received his Ph.D. in psychology at The Ohio State University.
“How much their hand is drawn to the choice they didn’t make can reveal a lot about how difficult the decision was for them,” said Stillman, who is now a postdoctoral researcher in marketing at Yale University.
Stillman conducted the study with Ian Krajbich, associate professor of psychology and economics at Ohio State, and Melissa Ferguson, professor of psychology at Yale...
The researchers were surprised at how accurate mouse tracking was at predicting how people would react to other similar risk choices.
“In many cases, we could accurately predict how people would behave in the future after we observed them just once choosing to take a gamble or not,”...
“It is rare to get predictive accuracy with just a single decision in an experiment like this.”
Learn more about how the researchers measured risk-taking, and what type of test they made participants take, over at Neuroscience News.
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