To a large extent, living consists of making decisions, an area of human behavior studied by psychologists, neuroscientists and economists from multiple points of view.
Because our personality is revealed in those daily choices: do I put up with this job that bores me sovereignly or do I jump into the void to look for something more interesting? Do I keep my money in the bank or do I invest it in the stock market? Do I hire an organized trip to Vietnam or do I rent a car and tour the country on my own?
I mean, do I tend to be cautious or don’t mind taking risks?
Well, according to an extensive study carried out by experts from the University of Basel, in Switzerland, and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, in Germany, with financial support from the Swiss National Foundation for Science, this predisposition in one sense or another is like the IQ , a psychological constant that remains stable throughout our lives. We are and will always be more or less reckless, regardless of the circumstances and the decisions that we finally adopt.
This is his conclusion after analyzing the personality of 1,507 adults between the ages of 20 and 36 who underwent three different types of tests: reports made by the volunteers themselves on their propensity to take risks in hypothetical situations, experimental tests with financial incentives and interviews about their daily behavior.
To ensure the robustness of the results, they repeated all the tests on 109 participants six months later.
An attention call
One of the most interesting findings of the work, published in the scientific journals Science Advances and Nature Human Behavior, is that the reaction to real and hypothetical circumstances was significantly very similar . Divergences occurred in experimental tests, and used to depend on the format of the test.
Thus, the volunteers responded differently if the risk was presented concretely, as part of the game that was proposed to them, or in a more abstract way.
Researchers believe that these types of experiments – those preferred by economists – tend to provide an inconsistent picture and difficult to explain with unified theories of risk taking , as Jörg Rieskamp, director of the Department of Economic Psychology at the Faculty of Psychology, has pointed out. from the University of Basel, who has participated in the research.
And this is how Ralph Hertwig, director of the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, has valued the importance of the new study: “It is a wake-up call to researchers to reconsider the way in which traits are measured. It is clear that traditionally there has not been a prior preference for taking risks or not in various situations, while our work (based on the testimony of the participants and on the real decisions of their lives) reveals that there is a general factor , which can be considered a stable character trait over time . This finding will make it possible to search for the biological bases of risky behavior in future studies “, the expert confides.
