Risk-Taking
Decision-Making Biases and Risk Taking
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Risk-taking refers to behavior known to possibly lead to danger, harm or loss and where decisions are made due to the perceived benefits being greater than the costs.
Risk-taking behavior can occur across many different domains, including:
- Social risk-taking such as disagreeing with a friend or questioning an acquaintance’s religious beliefs.
- Financial risk-taking such as engaging in impulsive spending or investing one’s life savings in an unfamiliar investment.
- Recreational risk-taking such as skydiving or bungee jumping.
- Health risks such as neglecting to visit a general practitioner regarding ongoing symptoms or sharing used needles during drug administration.
- Ethical risk-taking such as cheating on a spouse or stealing from another person; and general risk-taking tendencies across domains overall.
Risk-taking is a multifaceted construct as it is influenced by several different factors such as the decision-making abilities of the individual, the type of situation, and the attention that the individual pays to clues about the different consequences of their decisions.
Risk-taking is a type of decision-making that can be adaptive (e.g., taking a risk by investing in a stock option that will yield a large return) or maladaptive (e.g., taking heroin despite the probable legal, health, and social ramifications).
When risk-taking is maladaptive, it is at its core a poor decision that is made despite the dangers of the risk outweighing its benefits.
Risk-taking is influenced by individuals’ abilities to process feedback about previous experience (e.g., considering that previous drug use resulted in hospitalization and so not using drugs again) and consider information about situational outcomes when making decisions (e.g., considering the probability of getting caught buying heroin from a dealer by police; Torres et al., 2017).
As taking risks is a type of decision-making, it is also influenced by decision-making biases such as intolerance of uncertainty which is a biased perception of uncertain or ambiguous events as having negative outcomes (e.g., not being able to tolerate the unknown outcome of a court appearance, so using heroin to reduce anxiety; Garami et al., 2017).
The propensity of individuals to engage in such risk-taking behavior can be assessed using self-report scales that ask individuals to rate their likelihood of engaging in risky behavior; computerized decision-making programs in which participants make decisions in hypothetical situations designed to stimulate real-world scenarios.
Given the multifaceted nature of risk-taking, and the fact that individuals with drug dependence tend to be vulnerable to greater risk-taking than healthy populations, the factors influencing risk-taking in both populations will now be reviewed.
Dual-Systems Theory of Decision-Making
Risk-taking is a type of decision-making where the benefits of taking a risk are perceived to outweigh the potential consequences (Brockhaus, 1980).
Recent theories have suggested a dual-systems model of risk-taking involving:
- affective or emotional processes or
- cognitive and deliberate processes.
Affective processes underlie actions that tend to be more spontaneous, and are influenced by the emotions an individual is experiencing, which can bias the interpretation of the probability of an outcome and the associated gains and losses associated with an action, whereas cognitive or deliberative processes underlie actions that are intentional and are planned based on a consideration of the situational information presented.
Decisions based on the desire to fill a void, for example, may be made under the affective system due to the influence of emotions (e.g., despair or longing). One study investigated the applicability of the risk-sensitive foraging (RSF) theory— the theory that the level of risk undertaken to obtain food will depend on the level of hunger for food—to decision-making in heroin addiction.
Bickel, Giordano, and Badger (2004) assessed heroin-dependent hospital patients (N = 30) on RSF measures (i.e., scales that measure participant’s willingness to take risks given their hunger for food) with scenarios adapted to heroin use. Participants were asked to choose between constant (low risk) and variable (high risk) sources of heroin.
Heroin-dependents chose the constant (low risk) heroin source more often when the scenario was of heroin satiation and the variable (high risk) heroin source more often when the scenarios were of hunger for heroin.
The transferability of hypothetical scenarios to real-world behavior is questionable, and the reliability and validity of adaptations of the RSF scenarios are unknown, however the results suggests that RSF theory may be applicable to heroin use where hunger for heroin may result in higher risk-taking, driven by the affective decision-making system.
During satiation, fewer risks are taken, as more deliberate processes can be engaged when making decisions. Outside of the laboratory, the significance of the findings of Bickel et al. (2004) can be seen in the example of the goal of methadone maintenance therapy for heroin addiction.
The provision of methadone is intended to induce satiation for heroin, decrease withdrawal symptoms, facilitate sobriety from heroin use, and therefore reduce the risk of patients seeking heroin illegally (Gorzelanczyk, Fareed, Walecki, Feit & Kunc, 2014).
However, when decision-making processes are disrupted, an individual’s ability to consider the short- and long-term consequences of their actions and decide on an advantageous choice becomes impaired (Verdejo-Garcia, Chong, Stout, Yucel, & London, 2017).
This is true of drug-dependent individuals who tend to repeatedly engage in drug use despite the negative consequences they face, including criminal charges, ill-health, and in some cases, death (Verdejo-Garcia et al., 2017; Voon et al., 2015).
The affective system tends to override the cognitive control system in states of emotional arousal, which may explain increased risk-taking in stressful or emotional situations (e.g., taking heroin during methadone maintenance therapy in response to a stressful situation; Figner et al., 2009).
Adherence to intervention programs is also influenced by such decisions, whereby the continued use of illicit drugs lowers adherence to treatment plans such as methadone maintenance (Gorzelanczyk et al., 2014). Therefore, research on how affective and deliberative systems influence decision-making in heroin-dependent individuals is crucial to informing adherence to, and positive outcomes of, treatment programs (e.g., increased health and daily functioning and reduced crime rates).
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