Understanding the psychological mechanisms and motivations that lead some older adults to make riskier financial decisions than younger adults underlies a University of Texas at Dallas researcher’s new investigations, funded by a $560,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. “People accept positively skewed gambles — the low-chance, high-reward scenario [the first scenario] — more often than symmetric or negatively skewed gambles. This is called the positive-skew bias: People like positively skewed gambles more than other equivalent ones. The first set of experiments, concerning positivity effect, will ask participants about the details of a series of financial decisions as they make them. “It allows us to manipulate the amount of reward and see how that impacts decisions,” Seaman said.