However, for decades there have been indications that risk taking isn’t a one-dimensional personality trait: Instead, there are “insurance-buying gamblers” and “skydiving wallflowers,” as one group of researchers put it. An early study of more than 500 business executives, for example, looked at their preferences across a variety of risky choices, like business and personal investments, complex financial choice dilemmas, the amount of their own wealth held in risky assets, as well as nonfinancial risks. Clearly, if risk taking were a stable personality trait, then someone who tended to take risks in one area of decision making would also tend to report being a risk taker in the other domains. Yet this simply wasn’t so. Knowing the riskiness of an executive’s personal wealth strategy, for instance, told you nothing about how he’d behave in a business investment context. [...]
The critical point here is that “the risk in a given situation is inherently subjective, varying from one individual to the next.” It’s simply not possible to assess the “objective” characteristics of a risky situation, then infer a person’s appetite for risk from the decision she or he makes. The importance of subjectivity in the perception of risks and benefits for humanity’s colorful diversity of risk taking turns out to be equally crucial for understanding sex differences. Contrary to what many might assume, women and men have similar risk attitudes, Weber and colleagues found. For the same subjectively perceived risk and benefit, they are equally likely to tempt fate. When men and women do diverge in risk-taking propensity, it is because they perceive the risks and benefits differently. So are men inherently constituted to perceive risks more positively, making them more inclined to take them? A closer look at the actual pattern of sex differences in risk taking reveals important nuances that make this unworkable as an explanation. [...]
Indeed, there are already documented exceptions to the notion of risk taking as a masculine trait. A number of studies have found that women are at least as willing as men to take social risks (like admitting that their tastes are different from those of their friends, or disagreeing with their father on a major issue). Women were also found to be more likely than men to report that they would take risks in situations in which there was a small chance of benefit for a small fixed cost (such as trying to sell an already-written screenplay to a Hollywood studio, or calling a radio station running a promotion in which the 12th caller receives money). So why do perceptions of risks and benefits apparently differ between the sexes in some realms but not others? One obvious answer is that some activities—like unprotected sex or excessive drinking—may actually be objectively more risky for females. Risk researchers have also found that both knowledge and familiarity in a particular domain reduces perceptions of risk. Plausibly, men may tend to be relatively more knowledgeable or familiar with some of the risky activities that tend to feature in surveys (like sports betting, financial investments, and motorcycle riding).
No comments:
Post a Comment