Stressed Men More Likely to Engage in Risky Behavior
Stress can have a tremendous impact on a person’s life. Research suggests that it not only inhibits a person’s ability to function normally, but it can also be life-threatening.
Science Daily reports that a new study suggests that when men are under stress, they are more likely to engage in high risk behavior, such as gambling, smoking, unsafe sex, and illegal drug use. By comparison, women tend to moderate their behavior and are less likely to make risky choices under stress.
"Evolutionarily speaking, it's perhaps more beneficial for men to be aggressive in stressful, high-arousal situations when risk and reward are involved," said Nichole Lighthall of the University of Southern California Davis School of Gerontology and lead author of the paper. "Applied to financial risk taking, it's akin to competition for territory or other valuable resources."
To conduct this study, researchers asked participants to participate in the Balloon Analogue Risk Task. This game involved inflating a balloon to earn money at five cents per pump. Participants could cash out at any time or continue to pump, risking the explosion of the balloon if it is inflated past the randomly determined breakpoint. If the balloon were to break, all winnings would be lost.
In the control group, there didn’t seem to be a great difference between the actions of men and women. In the stressed group however, women inflated the balloon an average of 32 times. Stressed men inflated the balloon an average of 48 times.
"Men seem to enter more risky financial situations than women, which was part of the impetus for our study," Lighthall said. "But only in the stressed condition did we see any statistical differences in risky behavior between men and women."