Acute stress reduces risk-aversion by changing magnitude perception

Abstract

Stress is thought to impair financial decision-making by influencing the willingness to take risks. This effect is commonly attributed to stress-related changes in affective evaluation of rewards and their associated uncertainty. However, existing research has yielded inconsistent findings, and the psychological and neural mechanisms at play remain poorly understood. Here we show that acute psychosocial stress can affect financial risk-taking by altering basic perception of payoff magnitudes, independent of subjective valuation processes. Psychophysical and fMRI modelling reveals that stress reduces risk-aversion without changing choice consistency. A Bayesian perceptual model attributes this effect to an upward shift in prior beliefs about payoff magnitude: Under stress, participants choices are guided by relatively more optimistic beliefs about the risky options. A convergent pattern emerges in parietal neural representations of the payoff magnitudes, which show a systematic upward shift in neural coding as a consequence of the stress manipulation. These findings provide converging neural and behavioral evidence that stress influences financial risk-taking by changing neurocomputational processes related to magnitude perception. This has significant implications for psychological and neuroscience theories of stress and risky behavior, with potential applications to policy and clinical interventions.