Residential Mobility Influences Decision-Making Biases

With the trend of globalization,people relocate for various reasons,reflecting as the increase in residential mobility.A growing number of socioecological studies suggest that residential mobility plays a critical role in human's minds and behaviors,but few of them have linked residential mobility to decision-making biases.As decision-making commonly involves potential loss,risk or delay,people often exhibit biases,including loss aversion,temporal discounting and risk-aversion.With the increasing trend of residential mobility,individuals are often confronted with uncertainty and risk,which influences a series of mental processes and behaviors,such as emotion,cognition and social network.Meanwhile,these mental processes exert great impacts on human's decision-making biases.Thus,the current research aimed to examined whether and how residential mobility could affect loss aversion,temporal discounting and loss aversion.The current research conducted 4 studies which contains 11 experiments to test the relationships between residential mobility and monetary-based loss aversion,temporal discounting and loss aversion,respectively and comprehensively.These experiments employed methods including of survey and manipulation of the residentially mobile(vs.stable)mindsets,and used self-report measures on the behavioral level as well as Event-related Potentials(ERPs)techniques on the neural level in the Chinese and American samples.Results of Study 1 revealed that history of residential mobility is positively correlated with loss aversion;and that the residential mobile mindset significantly increased loss aversion by elevating the subjective feelings of uncertainty;and that on the neural level,sense of uncertainty could predict larger differential feedback-related negativity(FRN)amplitudes between large losses and gains in residential mobile group rather than residential stable group.Findings of Study 2 showed that residential mobility enhanced behavioral temporal discounting;and that residential mobile rather than stable group exhibited significant differential FRN between the present and future losses,but not between present and future gains;and that sense of uncertainty fully mediated the enhancing effects of residential mobility on temporal discounting.Study 3 discovered that history of residential mobility negatively predicted riskaversion,and that residential mobile(vs.stable)mindsets reduced risk-aversion.The comprehensive analysis including all variables in Study 4 found that the interaction between residential mobility and loss aversion/risk-aversion influenced temporal discounting,and simple analysis disclosed that residential mobility enhanced temporal discounting for participants with low(vs.high)loss aversion/risk-aversion;and that loss aversion mediated the diminishing association between historical residential mobility and risk-aversion for those primed with residential mobile rather than stable mindsets.Generally speaking,residential mobility moderated individuals' decision-making biases.This line of studies enriched the research on socioecological science and the field of economic decision-making,and has important implications for individuals' decision-making,organization management as well as socio-economic market governance.