than a lot of doctors. Doctors don’t like to be wrong.” Oh, and you
have to get used to getting yelled at a lot.
Being a high sensation-seeker can also cause problems in
urgent situations. Let’s say you work in an emergency room and you
need to take a blood sample from a particularly squirmy patient.
You are on a tight schedule and you have everything you need
except one thing: the correct-sized gloves. You need medium
gloves, but when you look in the supply closet there are only
small ones. Rather than searching all around for the correct glove,
you decide to gamble and wrangle your hands into the available
gloves that are a bit of a tight squeeze. During the procedure the
gloves break and you stick yourself with the needle. What’s to
blame? Your risky behavior or the gloves? Turns out that sensation-
seeking not only affects what behaviors you are likely to engage in,
but also how you justify the behaviors if they don’t work out.^6
How do high sensation-seeking medical professionals jus-
tify their unsafe actions in the workplace? They could either blame
their own personality or they could blame the situation (sometimes
called external self-justification), like hospital management or poor
access to proper equipment.
Remember some high sensation-seekers don’t see things
around them as threatening, as average and low sensation-seekers
do (it’s that lack of cortisol). In addition, high sensation-seekers are
less likely to think that their own actions will lead to negative
outcomes. This is even more so for high-risk high sensation-
seekers. We’ve seen that there’s a difference between thrill-
seekers and risk-takers. Risk is just what high sensation-seekers
will tolerate for the thrilling experiences they want to have. Not
all high sensation-seekers are risk-takers. But what happens when
high sensation-seekers are drawn to risky behavior and the risk
doesn’t pay off?
To get to the bottom of this Martina Dwi Mustika and
Chris Jackson of the University of South Wales in Sydney
recruited 108 nurses and measured their risk-taking using
a computer simulation called the Balloon Analogue Risk Task
(or BART for short).^7 The BART measures risk-taking and
involves pumping up a virtual balloon by pressing a button for
cash. Every time you press the button you get a little cash and
the balloon expands. You get to decide how many times to press
the button, however the balloon could pop at any time and then
you don’t get any cash at all. You can stop pressing at any time124 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:18:48, subject to the Cambridge