Measuring Risk Taking – Watching People Move the Computer Mouse

The way you move a computer mouse while deciding whether to click on a risky bet or a safe bet can reveal just how much a risk taker you are.

The researchers found that people whose mouse moved to the safe option on their computer screen, even when they ended up taking the risky bet, may be more risk averse than their choice would indicate. Those who moved the mouse towards risk before accepting the safe option may be more open to risk than it seems.

“We could see the conflict people felt in making the choice through hand movements with the mouse,” said Paul Stillman, lead author of the study who received his Ph.D. in psychology from Ohio State University.

“How drawn their hand is 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, an associate professor of psychology and economics at Ohio State, and Melissa Ferguson, a professor of psychology at Yale. It was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers were surprised by the accuracy of the mouse tracking in 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 observing them only once and choosing to bet or not,” Krajbich said.

“It’s rare to get predictive accuracy with a single decision in an experiment like this.”

The researchers conducted three studies with a total of 652 people. They measured the participants’ mouse movements as they made 215 decisions on various bets. Each bet was different, with some risks being greater than others.

Each participant’s mouse always started at the bottom center of the screen. Each trial began with two boxes appearing in the upper left and right corners of the screen.

One box offered them a 50/50 bet, such as a 50% chance of earning $ 10 and a 50% chance of losing $ 5. The other box contained a certain option which was usually equal to $ 0.

The question was: how would people move the mouse to their final choice?

In some cases, participants took a relatively direct path from where they started to the choice they made. Researchers interpreted this as a sign that the person was confident in their choice from the start and did not have many internal conflicts.

But sometimes, they veered towards one option or the other before settling on the other choice. This suggests that they felt some conflict.

This tells researchers a lot more about the participants than simply observing what they finally chose, Krajbich said.

“Choice data isn’t very useful for many purposes. You don’t know the strength of a person’s preference or how close they were to making the other choice, “he said.” And that’s what the mouse tracking measure can give us. “

For example, in one analysis, researchers looked at people who made the same choice on a bet. Could they say which ones would have moved on to the opposite choice on a similar bet?

It turns out they could, simply by measuring the mouse’s trajectories to see if they had veered to the opposite choice the first time around.

“We could distinguish between people very well, even when they made the same choice,” Stillman said. “It gives us a much richer picture of risk aversion and loss aversion in people.”

In one of the studies, the researchers tested whether they could manipulate the risk people were willing to take and whether it would be visible in their mouse trajectories.

In this study, the researchers told some participants to treat bets like a stock trader would. They were told not to focus so much on individual bets, but to see if they could build a “portfolio” of winning choices.

“When we told them to think like a trader, we could see from the mouse tracking that they were less conflicted when they accepted bets and more conflicted when they turned them down, just as we would expect,” Krajbich said.

Although this study looked at the trajectories of the mice, the results suggest that other motor movements could also provide insight into our decision making, according to the researchers.

“Swiping on a phone can also provide information on how people make a decision,” Krajbich said.

“What we are measuring is a physical manifestation of hesitation. Anything like that, like scrolling, could provide a similar taste of this internal conflict. “