How Well Do We Know Our Inner Daredevil? Probing the Relationship Between Self‐Report and Behavioral Measures of Risk Taking

To measure a person's risk‐taking tendency, research has relied interchangeably on self‐report scales (e.g., “Indicate your likelihood of engaging in the risky behavior”) and more direct measures, such as behavioral tasks (e.g., “Do you accept or reject the risky option?”). It is currently unclear, however, how the two approaches map upon each other. We examined the relationship between self‐report likelihood ratings for risky choice in a monetary gamble task and actual choice, and tested how the relationship is affected by task ambiguity (i.e., when part of the information about risks and benefits is missing) and age. Five hundred participants (aged 19–85 years) were presented with 27 gambles, either in an unambiguous or an ambiguous condition. In a likelihood rating task, participants rated for each gamble the likelihood that they would accept it. In a separate choice task, they were asked to either accept or reject each gamble. Analyses using a signal‐detection approach showed that people's likelihood ratings discriminated between accept and reject cases in their choices rather well. However, task ambiguity weakened the association between likelihood ratings and choice. Further, older adults' likelihood ratings anticipated their choices more poorly than younger adults'. We discuss implications of these findings for existing approaches to the study of risk‐taking propensity, which have often relied on self‐reported risk tendency for ambiguous activities. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Rhetorical Strategies for Scientific Authority: A Boundary-Work Analysis of ‘Climategate’

The term ‘Climategate’ refers to the episode in November 2009 when emails between climate scientists were stolen and published online. The content of this private correspondence prompted criticism from diverse commentators who cast doubts on the methods, claims, and members of the climate science community. In response, individual scientists and scientific institutions published statements responding to the allegations of scientific fraud. Gieryn's concept of ‘boundary-work’ can be used to analyse the rhetoric of scientists in situations where their legitimacy is disputed. More specifically, boundary-work can be used to analyse the responses of scientists in terms of: how they represent the attributes of science, what types of boundary-work they undertake (e.g. expulsion, expansion, and protection), and the professional interests that come into play. A boundary-work analysis of the commentaries published in the aftermath of Climategate reveals that scientists characterised climate science as consensual, asocial, and open. Scientists depicted climate science as consensual with the purpose of expelling dissenters and protecting areas of climate science from criticism. Scientists also described knowledge about climate as being ideally produced apart from society so that they could preserve their autonomy and exclude individuals who are accused of being ‘politically biased’. Scientists characterised climate science as necessarily open as the means to justify both existing and additional public funding for science and to avoid external corrective interventions against scientific opacity. Scientists and their critics alike interpreted the stolen emails as embarrassing deviations from the alleged social demands of a consensual, objective, and accessible science.