What Is Your Risk-Taking Style?
There is no such thing as a risk-taker - only risk-takers in particular areas
Calling someone a risk-taker turns out to be almost meaningless. When researchers measured risk-taking across different areas of life, the correlations between them were far weaker than anyone expected: the person who quits a stable job to start a company is not the same person who drives fast, and neither is reliably the person who will tell an uncomfortable truth at work. Appetite for risk is local, and this test measures five separate places it can live.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how likely you would be to do each thing, not about whether you approve of it.
What it measures
Five domains of risk: financial, health and safety, recreational, social, and ethical. They are measured separately because they behave separately - a high score in one tells you surprisingly little about the others.
Based on: Domain-Specific Risk-Taking scale (Blais & Weber, 2006)
Possible results
Financial
Money you could lose: investing, betting, backing yourself.
Health and safety
Risks to your body.
Recreational
Risk taken on purpose, for the experience.
Social
Risking other people's opinion of you.
Ethical
Risking your own integrity.
Common questions
Why am I bold in one area and timid in another?
Because that is the normal shape, and the main thing this line of research established. The most common explanation is that the domains differ in what the downside actually is: losing money, getting hurt, being embarrassed and harming somebody else are not the same kind of loss, and almost nobody weighs them equally. A person can be entirely rational and still be fearless with money and terrified of a difficult conversation.
Is taking more risk better?
Only in the social domain, and only reliably there. Being willing to be disliked has a poor downside and a good upside, which is an unusual combination. In the other four, more is not better - it is a preference with consequences, and in the ethical domain the consequences fall on someone else. The useful question is not whether you take enough risk but whether you are taking it in the domain where it would actually pay.
Does risk appetite change with age?
It declines on average, most steeply in the recreational and health domains and least in the social one. Some of that is preference and some is circumstance - people with dependants and mortgages face genuinely larger downsides than the same person did at twenty-two, so a falling score can be good judgement rather than lost nerve.
Sources
- Blais, A.-R., & Weber, E. U. (2006). A domain-specific risk-taking (DOSPERT) scale for adult populations. Judgment and Decision Making.
- Weber, E. U., Blais, A.-R., & Betz, N. E. (2002). A domain-specific risk-attitude scale: Measuring risk perceptions and risk behaviors. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.
- Highhouse, S., Nye, C. D., Zhang, D. C., & Rada, T. B. (2017). Structure of the DOSPERT: Is there evidence for a general risk factor?. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. doi:10.1002/bdm.1953
An honest note The central finding this test is built on is solid and slightly counterintuitive: risk-taking does not behave as one general trait. The domains correlate with each other far too weakly to justify calling anybody simply a risk-taker or simply cautious. Two limits. First, this measures stated likelihood, which is a behavioural intention rather than a behaviour, and the two come apart most in the ethical domain, where almost everyone reports being better than they are. Second, the original scale asks separately about perceived risk and expected benefit, and a great deal of what looks like boldness turns out on closer inspection to be someone judging the risk to be smaller, not being braver about the same risk. This short version cannot tell those two apart.