Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How Luck And Fortune Shape Risk-Taking Behaviors, Andrea Yvonne Ranieri

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The current study uses a lottery-based paradigm to examine how risk taking is affected by two specific types of good and bad experiences, luck and fortune. Though the terms are often used interchangeably, we suggest that they refer to two separate aspects of risk. Fortune refers to the overall positivity or negativity of the overall context, whereas luck refers to the probability of a better or worse outcome. To make the lottery context fortunate or unfortunate, a set of mixed-valence control lotteries were surrounded by all gain (good fortune) or all loss lotteries (bad fortune). To make the lotteries lucky …