When Do Men Take Risky Choices?

By Staff

Thursday, March 11, 2010, 12:31

Stress, is the word that humans, especially men should try to keep it at length. Now, according to a recent study, it has been found that men under stress are more likely to take risks, correlating to such real-life behaviour as gambling, smoking, unsafe sex and illegal drug use.

The study, however, didn't show any kind of adverse effects on women. It was found that stressed women moderate their behaviour and are less likely to make risky choices, which was not the case with men.

On this, the lead author, Nichole Lighthall, of the paper retorts: "Evolutionarily speaking, it's perhaps more beneficial for men to be aggressive in stressful,high-arousal situations when risk and reward are involved".He adds, "Applied to financial risk taking, it's akin to competition for territory or other valuable resources." Lighthall is from the University of Southern California Davis School of Gerontology.

So, how did the researcher reach the conclusion? The test involved the game called 'The Balloon Analogue Risk task' where both the sexes, men and women, were asked to inflate balloons to earn money. In the control group in the study men and women displayed statistically the same levels of risk. However, in the stressed group, women were 30 per cent less likely to take a risk than a man.

"Men seem to enter more risky financial situations than women, which was part of the impetus for our study. But only in the stressed condition did we see any statistical differences in risky behaviour between men and women," Lighthall said. He adds, "Obviously, there are situations in the real world where risky behaviour would not be beneficial. Sometimes being conservative, thoughtful and taking it slow are good things."