Abstract

JARDINES, Dalia K.  and  AVILA, Raúl. Relation of magical beliefs with discounting of monetary rewards. Acta de investigación psicol [online]. 2018, vol.8, n.2, pp.20-31. ISSN 2007-4719.  https://doi.org/10.22201/fpsi.20074719e.2018.2.02.

It has been suggested that magical beliefs like religious and superstitious ones are related with self-controlled/impulsive and risk aversion/proneness behaviors that people show. These behaviors could be quantified with discounting of the value of a reward as a function of its delay of delivery or probability of occurrence, respectively. Therefore, the purpose of this work was to investigate the relationship between magical beliefs and self-controlled/impulsive and risk-aversion/proneness behaviors using the method of discounting the relative value of the rewards. Eighty participants answered three tasks that were a magical beliefs one, a delay discounting one and a probability discounting one. The main finding of the study was that participants who had a higher score in the religious and the superstitious beliefs also had higher discount rates on temporal and probability discounting tasks than the ones who had a lower score in the magical beliefs. These results suggest a relation between magical beliefs and the phenomena studied with the discounting of the subjective value of delayed or probabilistic rewards. That is, these data suggest that the participants who showed a higher level of magical beliefs also showed more impulsive and risk-averse behaviors than the participants who showed lower level of beliefs.

Keywords : Religion; Superstition; Delay-discounting; Probability-discounting; Humans.

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