The effect of education and gender on emotion-based decision-making

In the last decade, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) has become a widely employed instrument for the investigation of emotion-based decision-making. Previous research has suggested that education may de-emphasise the role of emotion-based learning in decision-making, which suggests the paradox that better-educated participants should show poorer performance on the IGT. Previous research has also demonstrated gender differences on the task. We investigated the effects of education level and gender on performance on the IGT in the South African context. In order to investigate the effects of these two variables, two contrast groups were utilised: 32 volunteer university students and 20 less educated volunteers with, at most, a Grade 10 level of schooling. Both groups were divided equally by gender. It was found that the university-educated group outperformed the less educated group only in the last stage of the task. The learning profiles for the two genders appeared to be similar; no significant gender differences were found. A range of possible explanations are explored for these findings including: lack of motivation, differences in tracking punishments, differences in risk taking behaviours and difficulty with reversal learning. The implication of these findings is that, in real world situations, an excessive reliance on emotion-based resources may not be an advantage, and it may be that the university educated group was advantaged by a combination of emotional and cognitive sources of evidence. These results are discussed with reference to international findings.