Regulatory Fit Effect In The Risk-taking Decision Making

From motivation perspective, this article tried to apply two important relatedmotivation theories--regulatory focus theory and regulatory fit theory to risk takingdecision making, took undergraduate students as subjects, used experimental methods,examining whether the interpersonal risk regulation model can successfully inspire highself-esteem and low self-esteem participants the regulatory focus (promotion focus andprevention focus), furthering using the regulatory fit theory to discuss the framework of therisk taking decision making. The research include two experiments:Experiment1took undergraduate students as samples, asked them to manipulate therisk regulatory model, then asked the participants to complete lexical decision task.employed2(condition: threat vs. control)×2(self-esteem: high vs. low)×2(verb:promotion focus vs. prevention focus) mixed design, the results turned out to be that theinterpersonal risk regulatory model can successfully inspire the regulatory focus.Experiment2employed2(condition: threat vs. control)×2(self-esteem: high vs. low)×2(framework: gain vs. low) mixed design to explore the regulatory fit effect betweenregulatory focus and framework task. From individual factors, situational factors, taskfactors, and their interaction to discuss the influence on the risk-taking decision making,the results found that the threat condition inspire the high self-esteem person promotionfocus, which makes them show more risk-taking in the gains framework, and more riskaversion under loss framework. Instead, under the experimental condition, the preventionfocus which inspired by low self-esteem makes them more likely to take risks under theloss framework and show more risk aversion under gain framework, these results turn outto be the regulatory fit effect that regulatory fit influenced participants to show morerisk-taking, and also performed better on the tasks for the high self-esteem participants.But participants under the regulatory fit condition did not perform better on the tasks thanthe control participants did.