Movement chart of the crew’s systematic seek for longitudinal samples. Credit score: Bagaïnii et al. (Nature Human Behaviour, 2025).
Previous psychology analysis means that some persons are extra inclined than others to take dangers in unsure conditions, reminiscent of investing cash in dangerous enterprise ventures, consuming addictive substances or leaving a safe job with none positive various prospects. Over the previous many years, psychologists and behavioral scientists have been attempting to grasp the extent to which individuals’s willingness to take dangers (i.e., danger desire) is secure and coherent, which implies that it tends to stay constant over time and throughout totally different contexts.
Many current research have got down to examine the steadiness of danger desire and the extent to which it may be thought-about a coherent character trait. But, the findings collected up to now have been combined, which has made it tough to succeed in definitive conclusions.
Researchers on the College of Basel in Switzerland not too long ago reviewed a number of previous research exploring the steadiness of danger desire within the hope of higher understanding the character of this extensively investigated trait. Their analyses, revealed in Nature Human Behaviour, confirmed that there’s vital variability throughout present literature, each when it comes to the measures of danger desire used, the pattern of members recruited and the kinds of dangers that have been assessed.
“Understanding whether risk preference represents a stable, coherent trait is central to efforts aimed at explaining, predicting and preventing risk-related behaviors,” wrote Alexandra Bagaïnii, Yunrui Liu and their colleagues of their paper. “We help characterize the nature of the construct by adopting a systematic review and individual participant data meta-analytic approach to summarize the temporal stability of 358 risk preference measures.”
As a part of their meta-analysis, the researchers reviewed 33 previous longitudinal research, which concerned 57 samples, for a complete of 579,114 members. To match these research, they divided the danger desire measures utilized by the groups concerned into three broad classes, in addition to the demographic traits of members.
“Our findings reveal noteworthy heterogeneity across and within measure categories (propensity, frequency and behavior), domains (for example, investment, occupational and alcohol consumption) and sample characteristics (for example, age),” wrote Bagaïnii, Liu and their colleagues.
“Specifically, while self-reported propensity and frequency measures of risk preference show a higher degree of stability than behavioral measures, these patterns are moderated by domain and age.”
Bagaïnii, Liu and their colleagues additionally performed an evaluation assessing the diploma to which totally different measures of danger preferences utilized in previous research aligned (i.e., their convergent validity). Their findings confirmed that their convergent validity was low, that means that the measures employed in previous literature didn’t essentially seize a single trait however as an alternative various kinds of tendencies to take dangers.
“Our results raise concerns about the coherence and measurement of the risk preference construct,” wrote Bagaïnii, Liu and their colleagues.
Total, this current meta-analysis highlights the inconsistencies in how danger desire was measured and conceptualized in earlier analysis. The findings of the crew’s analyses might information future research specializing in folks’s danger preferences, probably prompting the event of extra exact definitions of danger desire and extra dependable measures that may very well be utilized throughout a variety of contexts.
Extra data:
Alexandra Bagaïni et al, A scientific assessment and meta-analyses of the temporal stability and convergent validity of danger desire measures, Nature Human Behaviour (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-02085-2.
© 2025 Science X Community
Quotation:
Exploring the steadiness of danger desire: Meta-analysis reveals discrepancies in the way it’s measured (2025, February 9)
retrieved 9 February 2025
from https://medicalxpress.com/information/2025-02-exploring-stability-meta-analysis-reveals.html
This doc is topic to copyright. Aside from any truthful dealing for the aim of personal research or analysis, no
half could also be reproduced with out the written permission. The content material is offered for data functions solely.
