Economic Decision-Making: Hormonal Determinants and Ritualized Behavior

Project Code: Economic Decision-Making: Hormonal Determinants and Ritual Behavior MUNI/G/0985/2017

Background

Ritualized behavior marked by ostensibly stereotypic and rigid characteristics is found in a variety of living conditions and customs, notably often without clear pragmatic function. Theories relate ritual performance to times of heightened psychological stress and unpredictability and authors even proposed isolated cognitive mechanisms translating future unpredictabilities to current changes in behaviors leading to higher level of ritualization (e.g., Hazard Precaution System by Pascal Boyer and Pierre Liénard). In many cultures rituals evolved as preferred personal or group types activities that are deemed to somehow secure positive bodily, mental or social effects.

The heightened physiological stress levels are affected, varied and accompanied by naturally cyclically occurring (ie hormonal cycles) or situationally appearing hormonal disbalances. Thus, tracking hormonal levels in stressful situations and understanding how they may be modulated by ritual performance are important for better understanding how behavior changes under stress. Specifically, the project aims to investigate variability in risk taking and the ability to accomplish mentally demanding task in stressful situations.

Objectives

Current research explores how hormones influence individual decision-making such as fairness in monetary allocations, cooperation, choices under risk and uncertainty, trust in financial relationships or cheating. For example, higher levels of testosterone have been correlated to more competitive and risky economic strategies while higher cortisol levels cortisol are associated with more selfish decisions.

In order to better understand the role of rituals in economic decisions, we will make a step further analyzing the effects of ritualized behavior that can be observed during the decision-making phase while controlling for hormonal levels. To that goal we composed an interdisciplinary team of religious scholars, economists and neuroscientists.

To better understand the effect of hormones on economic decisions, we measured differences in levels of cortisol, a hormone linked to stress, to ascertain its effect on choices in economic decision-making tasks. Additionally, we explored whether prescribing ritualized actions before stressful tasks can impact both performance and economic decisions as well as stress levels.

To further expand the boundaries of the research with a focus on more complex hormonal variations, the project also aimed to exploit naturally occurring fluctuations in hormonal levels, such as cortisol or progesterone levels changes during the menstrual cycle.

Publications:

Ovulatory shift, hormonal changes, and no effects on incentivized decision-making

https://www.econ.muni.cz/vyzkum/publikace/prehled/2300025

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487023000570

Posters:

https://www.levyna.cz/media/3611562/kundtovaklocova_poster.pdf

https://www.levyna.cz/media/3611557/ces2022-eva.pdf

Employing an incentivized controlled lab experiment, we investigate the effects of ovulatory shift on salient behavioral outcomes related to. As evolutionary psychology suggests, these outcomes may play an important role in economic decision-making and represent behavioral aspects that may systematically vary over the menstrual cycle to increase the reproductive success. Our results reveal no systematic behavioral differences between the ovulation and menstruation phases.

Forthcoming

The effects of ritualized behavior on economic decision making under stress.

The study seeks to explore the effect of cultural rituals by measuring the effect of habituated ritualistic behavior in risk taking, exploration-exploitation trade-off and cognitive performance task. For this purpose, we designed three specifically modified computerized tasks nested in sophisticated laboratory procedure preceded by period dedicated to ritual habituation. The study is complemented by appropriate physiological and hormonal measures to address individual stress level responses in time.