Neuroeconomics, Dopamine Genes and Professional Wall Street Traders
Sun, 29 Jan 2012 11:29:00 GMT
Via Jim Maher over at Finance Professor, comes this interesting article on some reasearch published this week at PLoS ONE.
...Traders who had successful careers, as measured by length of employment, tended to have genetic backgrounds linked to moderate levels of dopamine.
In other words, a good trader is likely to have a genetic code that influences a person's behavior toward competitiveness, but not the kind of thrill-seeking behavior in which risk taking becomes an addiction.
"Combining the personality analyses and genetic findings from the present study reveals that our sample of traders are analytical, integrative and can delay gratification," Zak and his co-authors wrote in their research paper.
The paper's title is "A Combination of Dopamine Genes Predicts Success in Professional Wall Street Traders." Zak co-authored the paper with two Claremont Graduate University students, Steve Sapra and Laura E. Bevin.
The researchers obtained their genetic samples by taking saliva samples from a test group of 60 Wall Street traders and a control group of 54 graduate students...
I was inspired to read a little bit around one of the authors, Paul Zac, who is the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University and found some interesting video:
On Trust, Morality and Oxytocin
On Markets and 'The Molecule of Love'
