Beyond money: Risk preferences across both economic and non-economic contexts predict financial decisions

Important decisions about risk occur in wide-ranging contexts, from investing to healthcare. While an underlying, domain-general risk attitude has been identified across contexts, it remains unclear what role it plays in shaping behavior relative to more domain-specific risk attitudes. Clarifying th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2022-12, Vol.17 (12), p.e0279125-e0279125
Main Authors: Reeck, Crystal, Mullette-Gillman, O'Dhaniel A, McLaurin, R Edward, Huettel, Scott A
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attitude
Attitudes
Behavior modification
Biology and Life Sciences
Decision making
Decision Making - physiology
Decision theory
Economic aspects
Economics
Evaluation
Expected utility
Experiments
Factor analysis
Factor Analysis, Statistical
Financial management
Health risks
Medicine and Health Sciences
Mental task performance
Multivariate statistical analysis
Physical Sciences
Polls & surveys
Psychology
Research and Analysis Methods
Risk premiums
Risk taking
Self report
Social Sciences
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Summary:Important decisions about risk occur in wide-ranging contexts, from investing to healthcare. While an underlying, domain-general risk attitude has been identified across contexts, it remains unclear what role it plays in shaping behavior relative to more domain-specific risk attitudes. Clarifying the relationship between domain-general and domain-specific risk attitudes would inform decision-making theories and the construction of decision aids. The present research assessed the relative contribution of domain-general and domain-specific risk attitudes to financial risk taking. We examined risk attitudes across different decision domains, as revealed through a well-validated measure, the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking Scale (DOSPERT). Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that a domain-general risk attitude shaped responses across multiple domains, and structural equation modeling showed that this domain-general risk attitude predicted observed behavioral risk premiums in a financial decision-making task better than domain-specific financial risk attitudes. Thus, assessments of risk attitudes that include both economic and non-economic domains improve predictions of financial risk taking due to the enhanced insight they provide into underlying, domain-general risk preferences.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0279125