<p>Do you have lazy friends or coworkers? Their attitude can rub off on you, according to a new study which shows that people tend to imitate behaviours of laziness, impatience and prudence.<br /><br />Prudence, impatience and laziness are personality traits that guide how people make decisions that involve taking a risk, delaying an action and making an effort, said Jean Daunizeau, from the Brain and Spine Institute (ICM) in France.<br /><br />Prudence is a preference for avoiding risk, and impatience is a preference for options that involve little delay and a strong desire for a payoff now rather than later.<br /><br />Lazy people are those who determine that the potential rewards are not worth the effort.<br /><br />In the study, the researchers recruited 56 healthy people. To measure the participants' attitudes toward risk, delay and effort, they were given a series of tasks.<br /><br />Participants were asked to choose between a 90 per cent chance of winning a small payoff in three days or a higher payoff in three months with lower odds.<br />They were then asked to guess "someone else's" decisions on a similar task, and after making a selection, they were then told which choice this "other" participant had made.<br /><br />However, the "someone else" was in fact a computerised model developed by the researchers.<br /><br />During the final phase of the experiment, the participants repeated the first task, in which they were asked to make their own decisions, 'Live Science' reported.<br /><br />The researchers found that after the participants observed the prudent, impatient or lazy attitudes of "others" on the task, their own choices about putting in effort, waiting during a delay or taking a risk drifted toward that of others.<br /><br />In other words, the participants started acting more like the computer-generated study participants.<br /><br />The study was published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology<br /></p>
<p>Do you have lazy friends or coworkers? Their attitude can rub off on you, according to a new study which shows that people tend to imitate behaviours of laziness, impatience and prudence.<br /><br />Prudence, impatience and laziness are personality traits that guide how people make decisions that involve taking a risk, delaying an action and making an effort, said Jean Daunizeau, from the Brain and Spine Institute (ICM) in France.<br /><br />Prudence is a preference for avoiding risk, and impatience is a preference for options that involve little delay and a strong desire for a payoff now rather than later.<br /><br />Lazy people are those who determine that the potential rewards are not worth the effort.<br /><br />In the study, the researchers recruited 56 healthy people. To measure the participants' attitudes toward risk, delay and effort, they were given a series of tasks.<br /><br />Participants were asked to choose between a 90 per cent chance of winning a small payoff in three days or a higher payoff in three months with lower odds.<br />They were then asked to guess "someone else's" decisions on a similar task, and after making a selection, they were then told which choice this "other" participant had made.<br /><br />However, the "someone else" was in fact a computerised model developed by the researchers.<br /><br />During the final phase of the experiment, the participants repeated the first task, in which they were asked to make their own decisions, 'Live Science' reported.<br /><br />The researchers found that after the participants observed the prudent, impatient or lazy attitudes of "others" on the task, their own choices about putting in effort, waiting during a delay or taking a risk drifted toward that of others.<br /><br />In other words, the participants started acting more like the computer-generated study participants.<br /><br />The study was published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology<br /></p>