Abstract

Focusing on how people perceive a person who makes a decision based on risk-reward levels, this study tested whether choosing a high risk-reward option leads to perceiving the decision-maker as of lower socioeconomic status, and whether this perception leads to underestimating the target’s emotional and physical pain. Therefore, we set the perceived socioeconomic status as a mediator. For the exploratory purposes, we set the target’s gender as a moderator and the target’s risk-taking tendency as a mediator. We found that participants perceived the socioeconomic status of the target who made the high (vs. low) risk-reward decision, as lower (vs. higher) and estimated the target’s physical pain as lower (vs. higher). There was no difference in the estimation of emotional pain depending on the risk-reward level. In addition, contrary to our predictions the effect of risk-reward level on pain estimation was found to be independent of socioeconomic status perception. The results of this study indicate that just as the risk-reward information can influence the choice of decision maker, it could also influence the observer’s perception of the decision makers.