THE EFFECT OF ACCUMULATED RESOURCES ON RISK TAKING - IN MEMORY OF FERENC MÉREI

• Authors: Farago Klara
• Languages of publication: HU

Abstracts

EN

Research offers a contradictory picture of the impact of accumulated resources on risk taking: both risk taking and risk avoidance were found in cases of either large or small resources.The authoress conducted a field experiment to study the behavior of students having abundant, enough or too few points (accumulated resource) to be able to pass a course requirement. Students received tasks of three levels of difficulty. Choosing more difficult tasks enabled them to gain more points. Everybody had two tasks to solve: one framed in a positive way, the other in a negative way. She compared the results of the field experiment to the results of two other investigations: to a questionnaire conducted with managers about risk taking in a successful or unsuccessful, increasing or decreasing enterprise, and to a hypothetical advice giving situation. She can generalize from her results collected in these different contexts that when close to the extinction point, people take biggest risks. Having abundant resources they also take big risks, but mainly in the negative frame. Having medium amount of resources, they are risk avoidant. The authoress discussed her results in the framework of Kurt Lewin's dynamic psychology, showing that the simultaneous consideration of situational, motivational and perceptual factors as well as the tendency to get better or worse, helps to understand risk taking.

Keywords

EN

ACCUMULATED RESOURCES; ASPIRATION LEVEL; FIELD EXPERIMENT; ORGANIZATIONAL RISK TAKING; RISK TAKING

Discipline

• PSYCHOLOGY: PSYCHOLOGY

• Publisher: Hungarian Association for Psychology
• Journal: Magyar Pszichologiai Szemle (Hungarian Psychological Review)
• Year: 2008
• Volume: 63
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 651-675
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Farago Klara

• Klara Farago, no address given, contact the journal editor

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

10HUAAAA074026