Associate Professor of Psychology Tara McKee presented a poster at the annual conference of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) in Boston on Nov. 20.
“The Loss Aversion Bias: Variations Related to ADHD Symptomatology” was co-authored with Kerry Reilly ’14 and was based on Reilly’s thesis work examining the concept of loss aversion, the finding that people tend to be more averse to losses than they are attracted to equivalent gains.
The research showed that across a variety of items, those with high ADHD symptomatology were less loss averse than individuals with low ADHD symptomatology, even after controlling for individual differences in risk taking.
The work has the potential to inform interventions for ADHD that are based more on losses, such as the removal of a desired object, rather than rewards.
