ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Personality and Social Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1537658
Differential Pathways from Personality to Risk-Taking: How Extraversion and Negative Emotionality Shape Decision-Making Through Overconfidence
Provisionally accepted
- Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu, China
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Understanding the mechanisms through which personality traits influence risk decision-making remains crucial in behavioral research. This study examined the mediating role of overconfidence in personality-risk relationships, focusing particularly on Extraversion and Negative Emotionality. We recruited 110 university students to complete the Game of Dice Task, personality assessments, and confidence estimation tasks. Mediation analyses revealed distinct patterns: Extraversion demonstrated both direct and indirect effects on risk-taking behavior, with overconfidence serving as a partial mediator (indirect effect: β = 0.101, 95% CI [0.012, 0.228]), explaining 20.5% of the total effect. In contrast, Negative Emotionality's influence operated primarily through overconfidence, showing full mediation (indirect effect: β = -0.216, 95% CI [-0.364, -0.091]) and accounting for 72.8% of the total effect. These findings advance our understanding of how personality traits influence decision-making behavior through cognitive mechanisms, suggesting that different personality dimensions may shape risk decisions through distinct pathways. The results provide implications for both theoretical development and practical interventions in riskrelated domains.
Keywords: Liutai avernue 555, Wenjiang District, Chengdu, 611130, China Personality traits, Risk decision-making, Overconfidence, mediation effect, Game of Dice Task, behavior economics
Received: 01 Dec 2024; Accepted: 30 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 He and Lei. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Peng Lei, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu, China
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