The authors review the self-other decision-making differences, and propose that such differences are derived from decision makers’ cognitive differences in construal level. The mental construals are low when people make decisions for themselves, whereas the mental construals are high when they decide for others. Theoretically, self-other decision-making differences are illustrations of bounded rationality. Practically, understanding such differences as well as their mechanisms helps to achieve optimal decisions.

Inconsiderate driving behavior is always attributed to environment or others, but is barely considered as the personal issue. This study investigated the fundamental effects of personality on inconsiderate driving behavior by adopting a questionnaire and a decision-making experiment. Results suggests that personality could significantly predict the behavior even the effects of situational factors were controlled. Meanwhile, when situational factors are similar, personal behavior shows consistency across situations. The conclusion strongly supported the thought of “a man drives as he lives”.

This study measured the risk perception, risk behavior propensity, and anxiety state of 494 residents in Hanwang, Panzhihua, and Beijing, which were impacted to different extent by the 5.12 Wenchuan Earthquake. The results confirmed the hypothesis of a Psychological Typhoon Eye Effect in terms of risk perception of tremors and risk behavior propensity, but revealed a reversed effect with regard to state anxiety. In addition, residents from Panzhihua, which is located in the edge zone of earthquake tremors, showed the most conflicting psychological reactions. The final part discusses the situational factors for Psychological Typhoon Eye Effect and Edge Zone Effect.

The authors explored the mental representations of food safety incidents. This study conducted exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis by collecting data (598) through internet. The results indicate that the public's mental representations of food safety incidents can be divided into cognitive and affective representations, four cognitive representation dimensions (industry trust, risk estimation, negative impact, and responsibility attribution) and one emotional representation dimension (negative emotion) is found to constitute the public?s mental representation structure. Current findings are discussed in relation to previous results, theoretical approaches, and practical implications.

This study tested the effects of goal setting, prior gain or loss as well as the distribution of decision reference points (status quo, goal and minimum requirement) on dynamic decision making under risk, by using a four-stage simulated stock investment task. Results indicated that subjects in the“do your best”goal condition made less risky decisions than those in the specific goal condition. Individuals who had gained in the former investment took lower risk than those who had lost previously. The authors also found that minimum requirements had consistently significant effect on the risky decision making, while only in the last phase of investment could the goal-achieving take effect, which was called the“last struggle”effect.

This research analyzes the structure of risky driving behavior, the factors influencing this behavior, and correlations between risky driving behavior and traffic accident. The research comes at four factors by exploratory factor analysis, which are highway code violations，aggressive violations，general errors, and dangerous errors. In addition, the authors argue the correlations between driving experience, personality, risky driving attitude, driving skill and risky driving behavior.

This study preliminarily explores people's psychological state resulted from SARS crisis using questionnaire survey. Both risk event characteristics and personal characters can influence subjects' perception, and accordingly disturb psychology and behaviour. The knowledge of SARS, risk characteristics, willingness, conformity, relying on family and so on, can predict one's psychological state to some extent. This study contemporarily probes into spread rule of psychological panic, and put forward "moderating effect of risk locus center" to explain psychological panic.

This study designs two kinds of variables to measure the characteristics of optimistic attitude by questionnaire methods. The results show that the gender difference generally exists in optimism and risk-taking tendency of an individual. But it displays dissimilar forms in the two kinds of variables. The gender difference in optimistic variables is implicit and complicated, which presents the interaction of the main dimensions of optimistic variables, namely positive expectancy and negative expectancy. In the other hand, it in risk-taking variables accords completely with the traditional conception toward the expectation of gender that male is more risk-taking than female does. Both variables, gender and optimism, can predict the risk-taking tendency of an individual.

The variables of the locus of control on individuals were defined in terms of internal-control and external-control. Based on these two dimensions, it analyzed the connections among the locus of control, the achievement motives and the risk-taking. The data supported the conclusion that there existed explicit relationships among the three kinds of variables. Despite the fact that both achievement motives and risk-taking tendency were notably related to the locus of control, the extent and the way of the correlation varied to some extent. There were mutual casualties between the two dimensions of the locus of control and the two tendencies of the achievement motives; moreover, from both the internal and the external dimensions, one might distinguish in individuals the two tendencies of seeking success and averting failure. As to the risk-taking, certain correlation could also be observed between the locus of control and the risk-taking; yet, the correlation was comparatively much weaker. The risk-taking tendency only displayed some internal-control characteristics, while the external-control dimension told nothing about it.

A questionnaire of "Individual Influence of Managers" was formed through collecting items, designing and conducting a initial questionnaire, and examining the structure validity of the questionnaire. The items were filtrated according to three evaluation criteria. Three sub-scales manifested individual personality scale 5.8(SD=0.4895)>power and norm 5.1(SD=0.6223)>interrelationship 4.7(SD=0.6189). It showed that managers' influence upon their subordinates mainly depended on their individual charm and personality and their effort to establish an informal authority, which was indeed an effective and recommendable way in enhancing one's influence in an organization. The managers could be divided into two groups, who showed significant variations on the three sub-scale variables of power, relationship and personality. Concerning these three variables, groups of high and low scores obviously differ from one another. The low-score group probably remained on a relatively lower level with regard to their way of influencing their subordinates. Improvement through some training was therefore needed. This study offered an effective tool for the training of managers' individual influences.

In order to understand the general relationship between optimism and risk-taking tendency, this study designs several independent situations and produces two kinds of variables: one to measure the general characteristics of optimistic attitude, the other to test if there is any consistency in the risk-taking tendency of an individual regardless of varying situations. The results show that there is some correlation between an individual's optimism and risk-taking tendency. Concerning such measuring indexes as risk-taking tendency, perception of risky situations and evaluation of risk-takers, highly optimistic group and lowly optimistic one display significant differences. Moreover, the varied measuring instruments used in this study produce highly consistent results, which speak for the reliability of this study.