Investigating the Impact of Cues of Harshness on Reflection Impulsivity Using Virtual Reality

Our environments shape and influence our cognition and behaviour and might even cause individuals to behave in ways that some may consider irrational. The present research aimed to gain further insight into this relationship between environment and cognition. Specifically, it was investigated how environments scoring high on the harshness dimension influence impulsive behaviour, compared to environments low in harshness. For this, an experiment was conducted in which participants were exposed to either a Virtual Reality (VR) scene that displayed a high number of cues of harshness or a VR scene with no cues of harshness. Afterwards, their tendency to make impulsive decisions without reflecting was measured using the Information Sampling Task (IST). A Mann-Whitney U test revealed no significant effect of the experimental condition on reflection impulsivity as measured by the IST. Therefore, the null-hypothesis, that there is no effect of the number of harshness cues on impulsive behaviour, had to be retained. Despite this, the present research can be considered an impulse to further investigate this relation between environmental harshness and impulsivity, for example by testing on a sample with a high diversity regarding participants’ background.