Prudence, impatience and laziness: Are these contagious personality traits?
"Prudence," "impatience" or "laziness" are typically thought of as entrenched personality traits that guide how people weigh the cost of risk, delay and effort (respectively). However, new research shows that people's attitudes towards effort, delay, or risk drift towards those of others. Jean Daunizeau and Marie Devaine, from INSERM, Paris, combined mathematical modelling and cognitive psychology to explore the laws that govern such attitude alignment. The authors asked 56 participants to make a series of decisions involving risks, delays or efforts, both before and after having observed the decisions of fictitious participants (in fact: artificial intelligence algorithms) whose prudent, patient and lazy attitudes were sensibly calibrated . The study results show that participants are bound to a "false-consensus" bias, i.e. they believe without evidence that the attitudes of others resemble their own. It also shows that people exhibit ...