Saving My Revised GRE Issue GRE Issue(Manuscript under Review) Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang.

g. All Rights Reserved Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012

Supplementary Ref

009

Sensation Seeking

Excerpt from Melvin Konner. Whey the Reckless Survive and Other Secrets of Human Nature, Viking, Penguin Group, 1990

People dont think clearly about risk. This no mere insult, but a conclusion that emerges from attempts by behavioral scientists to understand how people make decisions. We ignore some risks and overestimates others. For example, the number of deaths linked to a cigarette smoking in the United States is equivalent to three jumbo jets full of passengers crashing daily, day in and day out. We have fifty thousand traffic fatalities a yearalmost the number of deaths we suffered during our entire involvement in Vietnam. Half involve drunk drivers, and a large proportion would be prevented by seat belts or air bag. Compulsive gamblers have unrealistically high expectations of winning. On the average, in the larger game of life, they also have unrealistically high expectations of protection against losing. We prefer voluntary risks to involuntary onesor, put another way, risks that we feel we have some control over to those that we feel we dont. By the way we drive and react to cues on the road, we think, we reduce our risk to such low level that seat belts add little protection. But in case of the terrorist attack or the nuclear-plant accident, we feel we have no handle on the risks. We prefer familiar risks to strange ones. The homicide during a mugging, or the airliner hijacked in Athens, or the nerve gas leaking from an armed forces train, get our attention and so loom much larger in our calculations than they should in terms of real risk. Deaths that come in bunchesthe jumbo-jet crash of the disaster movieare more frightening than those that come in a steady trickle, even though the latter may add up to more risk when the counting is done.

The environment of our ancestors must have been full of danger. Nothing ventured, nothing gained must have been a cardinal rule; and yet venturing meant exposure to grave risk: fire, heights, cold, hunger, predators, human enemies. And all this risk has to be seen against a background of mortality from causes outside of human controlespecially disease. To die, in Darwinian terms, is not to lose the game. Individuals risk or sacrifice their lives for their kin. Sacrifice for offspring is ubiquitous in the animal world, and the examples of maternal defense of the young in mammals and male death in the act of copulation in insects have become familiar. During our own evolution small, kin-based groups might have gained much from having a minority of reckless sensation seekers in the rankspeople who wouldnt hesitate to snatch a child from a pack of wild dogs or fight an approaching grass fire with a counterfire. In any case, both sensation seekers and people in general should have taken their risks selectively. They may have found it advantageous to take risks with the seemingly controllable and familiar, even while exaggerating the risk of the unknown, and hedging it around with all sorts of taboo and ritual. People who are high in sensation seeking are also less tolerant of sensory deprivation. They are more likely to use drugs and become involved in sexual experiences, to be drunk in public, and to volunteer for high-risk activities and unusual experiments. Some people seek higher levels of stimulation and activity than others. The Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS) was designed to assess the personality traits of

Saving My Revised GRE Issue GRE Issue(Manuscript under Review) Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang. All Rights Reserved Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012

thrill and adventure seeking, disinhibition, experience seeking, and susceptibility to boredom. Sensation-seeking scales measure the level of stimulation or arousal a person will seek. Marvin Zuckerman and his colleagues have identified four factors that are involved in sensation seeking: Thrill and Adventure Seeking (TAS): desire to engage in sports or activities

involving speed and danger Disinhibition (Dis): desire for social and sexual disinhibition Experience Seeking (ES): desire for experience through the mind and senses, travel, and a non-conforming lifestyle Boredom Susceptibility (BS): aversion to repetition, routine, and dull people