Doctors Tim Gamble and Ian Walker from the Department of Psychology at the English University of Bath are the creators of a study on the perception of danger, published in Psychological Science . For the experiment they used 80 adults between the ages of 17 and 56, whose sensations and perception of behavior they measured in a computer simulation .
Participants were told that they were going to participate in research on eye movement tracking. 39 of them were fitted with a bicycle helmet worn by the apparatus in charge of carrying out this supposed eye movement analysis, while the other 41 were fitted with a baseball cap.
Volunteers had at their disposal a button that they could push and that blew air into a balloon. The instructions they received were that the one who was able to hit the button the most number of times and stop just before the balloon exploded would win.
The results of the experiment showed that the subjects who wore the helmet unconsciously took more risks and pressed the button more times, while those who wore a cap behaved more prudently and stopped pressing the button much earlier. According to this study, protective elements in general make us take more risks and also stimulate the search for sensations .
Credit image: © Fabio Cardoso / Corbis
