Risk Taking Definition

Introduction

“Risk taking is any consciously, or non-consciously controlled behavior with a perceived uncertainty about its outcome, and/or about its possible benefits or costs for the physical, economic or psycho-social well-being of oneself or others”(Rudiger, 1994).Over the past century, multiple theories have been developed to understand how people assess risk. For example, theory of investments assumes people are perfect rational and ignore the influence of risk behaviors in decision-making. However, several real-life examples show that human are not always risk -averse. Last big example was the financial meltdown of 2008 were the primary factor was the excessive risk-taking by financial institutions. In order to address this problem

Most of the ways that were proposed for risk taking behavior assessment were by self-report instruments which found a correlation between two personality traits (sensation seeking and impulsivity ) and risk-taking. ( Adams & Moore, 2007; Dunlop & Romer, 2010; Hittner & Swickert, 2006). Also another way to measure risk behavior was through field experiments with the most well known to be the Balloon Analogue Risk task (BART) that was introduced by (Lejuez et al., 2002) and the paid lotteries choices (Bateman & Murnion ,2005;Dohmen ,2011). The last years there are a lot of research that used these experiments to relate risk behavior with different group of people. For example difference between gender (Stark & Zawojska,2015) ,age, education (Blais & Weber 2006a), cultural (Blais & Weber 2006b) or even to find relationship between smokers ,alcohol drinkers people who drive fast etc(Lane

The first part measures risk taking behavior of individual versus couples and the second between married couples and couples formed by strangers. To measure risk-attitude we used the BART-Y experiment which is a youth version of the Bart experiment. which sybjects collect point rather than money. Participants are instructed that points are exchanged with lotteries that give prizes at the end of the testing session. Reliability and validity data on the BART-Y yielded similar results to the original experiment(BART), suggesting that dissemination of prizes can substitute cash as a reward. (Lejuez ,2007). For the purpose of our experiment we will used also a self-report instrument which we choose the Impulsivity sensation seeking (ImpSS).The reason behind this selection is that several studies have shown that ImpSS show predictive validity with risk taking behaviors ( McDaniel &Zuckerman, 2003; O’Sullivan et al 1996; Robbins & Bryan,