Speaker：裴瑞，斯坦福⼤学⼼理系博⼠后研究员

Time： 4月15日（周二）上午10:00-11:30

Venue：王克桢楼1113

Host：Changqin Lu

Abstract

Humans yearn for deep social relationships, but connecting with people is a risky business: a friendly attempt to reach out to a stranger may be rejected, or an intimate confession of feelings could fall flat. My work focuses on these social risk decisions, or decisions that can have either positive or negative social consequences. Do people approach these decisions similarly compared to other risky decisions, such as financial investments? And how do these social risk behaviors affect social networks and wellbeing? Prior work has separately examined the “social” and “risk” components: social psychologists investigated phenomena such as talking to strangers and self-disclosure, and work in behavioral economics examined how people consistently approach or avoid taking risks in different contexts. My work integrates these two lines of research and examines social risk behaviors through a risky decision-making framework. First, I will show evidence that taking social risks involves distinct psychological processes compared to taking financial risks. Further, using a combination of multilevel longitudinal models and field experiments, I explore and demonstrate the role of social risk taking in promoting social connectedness, physical health, and psychological wellbeing. Together, these results provide a novel lens to understand human social interactions, and carries implications that can contribute to social connections and wellbeing.