The Effect Of Time Scarcity On Risk-Taking Behavior: The Mediating Role Of Anticipated Regret

Risky decisions are decisions that people make after weighing the options with multiple outcomes and whose probabilities are known.Risk-taking behavior is a special type of risk decision,which is people’s wrong reflection of the motivation behind the behavior,that is,individuals will engage in risk-taking behavior with positive expectations of potential loss.For example,individuals can quickly detect the positive or negative results of risk behaviors,gambling behaviors,through more or less mathematical operations.The results of these behaviors are immediate feedback,so individuals quickly get regret or negative emotional experience.Time scarcity refers to the subjective feeling of "lack of time resources" experienced by individuals who think that the objective time they have is less than the time they need.Previous studies have confirmed that the perception of time scarcity can affect individual’s choice,judgment and decision making.However,few studies have explored this kind of influence empirically,as well as the impact of anticipated regret as a negative emotional experience on risk-taking behavior when people feel time scarcity.Therefore,this study attempted to further explore the influence of time scarcity on risk-taking behavior by experiments and investigate the mediating role of anticipated regret.The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of time scarcity on risk-taking behavior and its underlying mechanism.The research with experiment as the research method,college students as the research object.Two experiments are conducted to test the hypothesis proposed in this paper.In Experiment 1,the influence of time scarcity on risk-taking behavior was first investigated,and the results showed that participates’ risk-taking behavior would be improved under the condition of time scarcity.In Experiment 2 again examined the impact of time scarcity on risk-taking behavior,and further explored the underlying psychological mechanism of their relationship between time scarcity and risk-taking behavior.The results were consistent with Experiment 1,with the experimental group having a significantly higher risk-taking rate than the control group.Mediation analysis revealed that anticipatory regret serves as mediating role between time scarcity and risk-taking rate of the experimental group was significantly higher than that of the control group.Mediation analysis found that anticipated regret plays a mediating role between time scarcity and risk-taking behavior,which indicates that under the time scarcity condition,the more anticipated regret participants experienced,the more risk-taking behavior they would have.In conclusion,this study found that the perception of time scarcity has an impact on individual risk-taking behavior through both experiments,as well as it also explored the internal psychological mechanism of this impact.The findings suggest that people with high time-scarcity scores tend to engage in higher levels of risk-taking behavior because they experience more anticipated regret in their decision-making process.This study examines the impact of time scarcity on risk-taking from the perspective of resource scarcity,which enriches the studies of time and risk-taking areas.Moreover,the research results have certain application significance,which can provide a new perspective of adjustments for people facing the dilemma of time scarcity.