What’s the riskiest decision you ever made? If the results of a new study are to be believed, there’s a pretty good chance you just answered either “quit my job” or “accept a new one” – or perhaps you’re one of the few whose anxieties just revolve around the rise of 5G.
Whatever your definition of “risk”, though, it’s likely the University of Zurich team behind the new paper found it. “Our basic goal was really to try to tap people’s actual experiences from real life,” explained Renato Frey, one author of the study and professor of psychology at the University, in a statement last week.
Why? Because Frey and his co-author, Olivia Fischer, work in the area of psychology known as decision research – specifically, studying “how people make choices in the modern world full of risk and uncertainty,” per Frey’s homepage. But that’s kind of hard to do if you don’t really know what people consider risky or uncertain, and so far, our knowledge base has been kind of… lacking.
That’s why the pair decided to fill it in.
What we knew – and what we assumed – about risk
It’s not that Frey and Fischer are the first to study how people make decisions they consider risky – far from it. It’s just that past research of this type has generally been done in a “top-down manner,” Frey explained. In other words, researchers come up with scenarios that they consider risky, and then investigate how participants react.
But that becomes a problem if the two people have particularly different ideas of what constitutes risk – and, thanks to the way this particular area of research works, they probably do.
“Pun intended, there’s the risk that we study outdated phenomena,” Frey said, explaining that the fundamental theories underlying these “risky” hypotheticals are often now decades old. People today are working from a totally different basis than those back in, say, 1980: we have new diseases; new wet bulb temperatures; doomscrolling and phubbing; we’ve got unrealistic body standards like you wouldn’t believe. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that what we consider “risky” might have changed as well.
But how do you find out? Pretty straightforwardly, actually: you just ask people. Frey and Fischer surveyed a total of 4,380 people over three individual experiments, asking them to name either a risk they decided to take in their own life (or one they decided against taking), or one that they believed most people might face and choose to take (or reject) at some point. Then, once a longlist had been compiled, they asked participants to rate how often they are actually faced with those decisions, and what way they usually swing when it comes to crunch time.
Their result, per the paper, is a “concise inventory of 100 risky choices” faced in the modern world – and it’s remarkable if only for its unremarkableness. The types of decisions we have to make, and the aspects of our lives they affect, are “surprisingly stable,” Frey noted – even despite the investigation straddling one of the biggest upending of life in recent history, the COVID-19 pandemic.
What we see as risky
So, what is it that we see as most risky? It’s not even close: beating all other choices by a factor of at least around 2, it’s accepting a new job and quitting the one we have that take the two top spots. In fact, occupational decisions seem to put us most on edge generally, with almost one in three reported choices falling into this domain – the second-most common area, health, was only cited 18 percent of the time.
That finding alone is arguably interesting enough to vindicate the study. Current lines of questioning in decision research sometimes assume that people are most worried about their health or leisure time, Frey explained – but “according to our data, it seems to be a bit like vice versa,” he said. “First and foremost, people think of occupational risky choices.”
But that’s not the only tidbit the study turned up. The most risky decisions we encounter also change based on characteristics like our age or gender – something that had previously gone underappreciated. Some make intuitive sense: younger people are more likely to think of quitting a job without a sure-thing replacement, while older folk tend toward finding moving into a new position the riskier choice – a difference that tracks with where said participants are likely at in their career progression. Others are perhaps trickier to explain: consider, for example, that twice as many men as women suggested “accepting 5G” as a risky decision they recently made, or that men in their 30s and 40s seem far more preoccupied with the idea of getting surgery than women of any age.
Still, it’s all good information. “These more nuanced patterns help us understand essentially which subgroups of the population are exposed to which risky choices,” Frey said. “I think this helps policymakers better understand whether people of particular subgroups of the population need support or decision aids.”
Of course, there are a few things to bear in mind about the results. They’re based only on the responses of German-speaking people in Switzerland – a country with very low crime rates and a very high quality of life. Events that qualify as “risky” there may not map exactly onto, say, a young person in the US, where gun violence is rampant, timely healthcare is basically unaffordable for most (and the government seems to be doing its best to reduce the quality of what’s available), and your job can often be taken from you for no reason and without warning.
With that in mind, the new list “should […] not be directly taken as a measurement scale and used blindly to gauge real-life risk taking in other cultures and populations,” the team cautions – though they suggest that it might serve some purpose as a jumping off point, perhaps to compare and contrast risk across cultures.
A worthy addition
Ultimately, while Frey and Fischer are clear that their study doesn’t replace the more theoretical work used to investigate risky decision making, it’s nevertheless a valuable “checkup” for the discipline.
“I think this [study] could serve as kind of a blueprint for how, at least every once in a while, we should probably reach out and do this more discovery-oriented, data-driven, bottom-up research,” Frey said. “We really need both parts in psychological science.”
The study is published in Psychological Science.
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