Passive Risk Taking

The concept of risk-taking is a human behavior that implies a possibility of danger or harm whilst additionally giving a chance to acquire some type of prize (Leigh apud. Lejuez et al., 2002). It is clear that risk-taking behaviour manifests very different for every individual (Rubio et al., 2010). One of the aspects that influence individual differences in risk-taking behaviour can be age. It has been shown that adolescents are more likely to engage in risky decision making than adults, partly because of this period of life’s characteristics. Nonetheless, in laboratory studies, it has also been demonstrated that by mid-adolescence, teenagers have almost the ability to understand and manage risk situations as do adults (Fischhoff apud. Gardner

Passive risk-taking has been measured using the Passive Risk Taking Scale, developed by Keinan & Bereby-Meyer (2012), who applied the test to 150 undergraduate students and obtained three separate dimensions of passive risk-taking, regarding resources, health and ethics. While risk-taking has been previously studied in relation to personality, passive risk-taking did not receive the same amount of attention, being a new

Gullone and Moore’s (2000) research on adolescents has found associations between personality traits such as agreeableness and extraversion and low scores in risk judgement in their participants. In their study participants with high scores in conscientiousness were found to get high scores in risk judgement in ‘antisocial’, ‘rebellious’ and ‘reckless’ dimensions but not in ‘thrill seeking’ where their scores were lower. Consistent with the results of Gullone et al., Skeel et al.’s (2006) found in their study a low to moderate negative correlation between conscientiousness and risk behaviour. However, using the same scale as Gullone, their study found a strong positive correlation between risk behaviour and neuroticism, whereas in Gullone et al. (2000) neuroticism had no significant relationship with any of the risk measures used. Skeel et al. (2006) suggest that this discrepancy in results might appear due to the age of the participants in their