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Risk preference shares the psychometric structure of major psychological traits.

  • Frey R Center for Cognitive and Decision Sciences, Department of Psychology, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland.
  • Pedroni A Methods of Plasticity Research, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
  • Mata R Center for Cognitive and Decision Sciences, Department of Psychology, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland.
  • Rieskamp J Center for Economic Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland.
  • Hertwig R Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.
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  • 2017-10-07
Published in:
  • Science advances. - 2017
Adult
Choice Behavior
Cognition
Germany
Healthy Volunteers
Humans
Models, Psychological
Personality
Psychometrics
Quantitative Trait, Heritable
Risk-Taking
Socioeconomic Factors
Surveys and Questionnaires
Switzerland
Young Adult
English To what extent is there a general factor of risk preference, R, akin to g, the general factor of intelligence? Can risk preference be regarded as a stable psychological trait? These conceptual issues persist because few attempts have been made to integrate multiple risk-taking measures, particularly measures from different and largely unrelated measurement traditions (self-reported propensity measures assessing stated preferences, incentivized behavioral measures eliciting revealed preferences, and frequency measures assessing actual risky activities). Adopting a comprehensive psychometric approach (1507 healthy adults completing 39 risk-taking measures, with a subsample of 109 participants completing a retest session after 6 months), we provide a substantive empirical foundation to address these issues, finding that correlations between propensity and behavioral measures were weak. Yet, a general factor of risk preference, R, emerged from stated preferences and generalized to specific and actual real-world risky activities (for example, smoking). Moreover, R proved to be highly reliable across time, indicative of a stable psychological trait. Our findings offer a first step toward a general mapping of the construct risk preference, which encompasses both general and domain-specific components, and have implications for the assessment of risk preference in the laboratory and in the wild.
Language
  • English
Open access status
gold
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/global/documents/21926
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