On prospect theory, making choices for others, and the affective psychology of risk

How risk perception and loss aversion affect farmers' willingness to withdraw from rural homesteads: Mediating role of policy identity

Government-guided withdrawal from rural homesteads is a sustainable solution to the problem of vacant rural residential land. Nonetheless, few studies have considered the influence of risk perception and loss aversion on farmers' decisions to withdraw from rural homesteads, and even fewer have investigated the role of policy identity. Using fieldwork-collected primary data and a lottery-choice experiment from a reform pilot area of southwestern China, this study aimed to provide a new focus for risk perception and loss aversion in farmers' intention to withdraw from rural homesteads through policy identity. According to our findings, only 45.30 % are willing to withdraw from their homesteads. Farmers typically perceive two to three categories of risks among residence risk, livelihood risk, security risk, and policy risk. Only 29.28 % of respondents report a low level of loss aversion, with the remainder reporting a moderate or high level. More than half demonstrate a high level of policy identity. Most notably, after dealing with endogeneity, risk perception has a negative impact on farmers' intention to withdraw from rural homesteads, whereas loss aversion has a positive impact. Policy identity has a positive influence on farmers' intention, partially mediating the negative path of risk perception and entirely mediating the positive path of loss aversion. Robust concluding remarks advocate for the improvement of farmers' policy identity based on heterogeneous characteristics of risk perception and loss aversion, as well as a more individualized consideration of land withdrawal options.

Neural bases of loss aversion when choosing for oneself versus known or unknown others

Despite the ubiquitous interdependence between one's own decisions and others' welfare, and the controversial evidence on the behavioral effect of choosing for others, the neural bases of making decisions for another versus oneself remain unexplored. We investigated whether loss aversion (LA; the tendency to avoid losses over approaching equivalent gains) is modulated by (i) choosing for oneself, other individuals, or both; (ii) knowing or not knowing the other recipients; or (iii) an interaction between these factors. We used fMRI to assess the brain activations associated with choosing whether to accept or reject mixed gambles, either for oneself, for another player, or both, in 2 groups of 28 participants who had or had not briefly interacted with the other players before scanning. Participants displayed higher LA for choices involving their payoff compared with those affecting only the payoff of other, known, players. This "social" modulation of decision-making was found to engage the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and its inhibitory connectivity to the middle cingulate cortex. This pattern might underpin decision-making for known others via self-other distinction processes associated with dorsomedial prefrontal areas, with this in turn promoting the inhibition of socially oriented responses through the downregulation of the midcingulate node of the empathy network.

Effective Strategies to Promote the Cultivation of Public Legal Consciousness from the Perspective of Social Psychology

In order to build a harmonious economic society, show the legal function in the society, enable people to live and work in a better environment, and increase people's practicality in the legal society, it needs to be analyzed from the perspective of social psychology. This paper comprehensively analyzes the current public legal knowledge, uses a deep neural network model, and implements the cultivation of public legal awareness. On this basis, it integrates the data and information before and after 2020, uses the method of book case distribution training, constructs a legal framework, relies on the data distribution technology, constructs a web legal awareness training system, and increases the conditions for promoting the cultivation of public legal awareness based on the background operation of the integrated website. It can be seen that in the perspective of social psychology, the importance of the cultivation of public legal awareness can be achieved through new algorithms, so that people can pay attention to the cultivation of legal awareness, which can provide corresponding protection for the operation and maintenance of the legal system.