My first PhD project is out there. Thank you to my advisor @psmaldino.bsky.social and to mentor, co-author and friend @babeheim.bsky.social for encouraging and helping build this exciting and insightful collaboration. Onwards! - ThreadSky

apvelilla.bsky.social • 30 days ago

My first PhD project is out there. Thank you to my advisor @psmaldino.bsky.social and to mentor, co-author and friend @babeheim.bsky.social for encouraging and helping build this exciting and insightful collaboration. Onwards!

Reposted from Paul Smaldino

The Development of Risk Attitudes and their Cultural Transmission

New preprint w/ Alejandro Pérez Velilla & @babeheim.bsky.social. This is one of the best modeling papers I have ever been involved in, tackling developmental, cultural, and class differences in risk attitudes.
osf.io/preprints/so...

Comments

apvelilla.bsky.social•27 days ago

We modeled a growth process where individuals choose the proportion of resources to invest in future growth as a response to acquired information on their risk of ruin. By observing and reacting to the ruin of peers, acquired pessimism can keep people afloat and be passed on to new generations.

apvelilla.bsky.social•27 days ago

Using this we study the value of learning strategies across development when risk matters. Generally speaking, as wealth buffers increase, risk of ruin decreases. This allows individuals to diversify their learning strategies, incorporating information from peers, elders, and individual experience.

apvelilla.bsky.social•27 days ago

Relying too much on peer information during juvenile development can lead to catastrophic optimism in adulthood, unless wealth buffers are low and the environment starves us for information. In those cases, individuals do best when they every bit of information they can get.

apvelilla.bsky.social•27 days ago

In order to compensate for the tendency for optimistic gambling, individuals with low wealth buffers must be very sensitive to the observed ruin of peers and rely mostly on adaptive information from elders. As wealth buffers increase sensitivity and elder influence can safely decrease.

apvelilla.bsky.social•27 days ago

We also link the evolution of maladaptive risk tolerance in deprived populations to payoff-biased learning, which can be selected-for due to the disproportionate cultural contribution of payoff-biased risk takers. While most of them fall to ruin, a very few lucky ones experience considerable gains.

apvelilla.bsky.social•27 days ago

Their payoffs are so high relative to the rest of the (surviving) population that they can generate a minority of payoff biased individuals in the next generation, who will go on to perpetuate the cycle.

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply