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Martina Raue · Eva Lermer
Bernhard Streicher Editors
Psychological
Perspectives on
Risk and Risk
Analysis
Theory, Models, and Applications
Foreword by
Paul Slovic
Psychological Perspectives on Risk and Risk
Analysis
Martina Raue • Eva Lermer • Bernhard Streicher
Editors
Psychological Perspectives
on Risk and Risk Analysis
Theory, Models, and Applications
Foreword by Paul Slovic

Editors
Martina Raue Eva Lermer
AgeLab Department of Experimental Psychology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology University of Regensburg
Cambridge, MA, USA Regensburg, Germany
Bernhard Streicher FOM University of Applied Sciences

Institute of Psychology for Economics and Management
UMIT - Private University for Health Munich, Germany
Sciences, Medical Informatics and
Technology
Hall in Tyrol, Austria
ISBN 978-3-319-92476-2 ISBN 978-3-319-92478-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92478-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951412
© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of
the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
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Foreword
I have been fortunate to study psychological aspects of risk since 1959. At that time,
this was a topic of interest to only a handful of researchers, far from the mainstream
of psychological inquiry. Risk and decision making then was the province of econo-
mists and mathematicians, building on a rich intellectual heritage going back centu-
ries and based around formal models such as utility theory.
Only a few years earlier, in 1954, a psychologist named Ward Edwards, son of an
economist, had written a brilliant review that eventually sparked a revolution. Titled
“The Theory of Decision Making,” it sought to educate psychologists about eco-
nomic theories and concepts, e.g., “utility,” and the potentially rich psychological
issues underlying them. Edwards used his own research on probability and variance
preferences among gambles as an example of how experimental psychology could
be brought to bear on understanding human behavior in the face of risk. A few phi-
losophers and mathematical psychologists joined the effort and a new field of study
was born.
Now, more than half a century later, many hundreds of researchers have created
a legacy of thousands of articles contributing to a complex, multifaceted, and fasci-
nating portrait of risk perception, risk communication, and risk management. Even
economists, long resistant to psychological approaches, have now joined the parade
as champions of “behavioral economics.”
Readers of this book have, in one place, an up-to-date and authoritative overview
of the important ideas and findings generated by these decades of empirical and
theoretical research. Employing this knowledge won’t rid the world of risk, but it
will make the world a safer place.
Decision Research and University of Oregon Paul Slovic

Eugene, OR, USA
v
Preface
Risk is not out there, waiting to be measured! Risk is subjective, danger is real.
—Paul Slovic
A firefighter can make a life-or-death decision under time pressure without thinking
much about it. A child can cross a busy street without knowing facts about velocity
or braking distances. Some people decide to go base jumping or free climbing,
while others—or even the same people—get nightmares from the thought of having
to fly in an airplane. Most people agree that measles pose a much greater risk than
the vaccination against them, but a minority still refuses to have their children vac-
cinated. People fear terrorist attacks, but not heart attacks, despite the fact that more
people die from heart attacks than terrorist attacks. Some companies grow and
expand in the face of changing markets, new technologies, and emerging regula-
tions, while their competitors fall into bankruptcy around them. These examples
demonstrate that people, either for themselves or as members of an organization, are
good at judging risk in certain situations, but fail in other situations. Different peo-
ple judge risks differently than others, and some seem to take more risks than others.
Psychology offers explanations for these observations, strategies to communicate
risk effectively, and practical implications for industry and policy. This volume
bundles many of these insights.
“Risk is subjective, danger is real,” but nevertheless, risk is often stated in num-
bers, mostly probabilities. How likely is it to die from an airplane crash? How likely
are complications from a measles infection? How likely is a terrorist attack? How
likely is it to die from a heart attack? How likely is it to win the lottery? How likely
is heads over tails? Every decision situation that can be expressed in probabilities is
a decision under risk. When I choose heads over tails, there is the “risk” of being
wrong or losing when the coin flips to tails. The odds of the coin flip are clear; the
chance of heads or tails is 50%. The chance of winning the lottery is about 1 in
175,000,000. But what are the chances of death or serious injury while base jump-
ing? While experts can provide us with probabilities based on mathematical models
or research data for some situations, high uncertainty still reigns in many others.
How should I weigh the pros and cons of one medical treatment over another? How
vii
viii Preface
do I make investment decisions without knowledge of future developments on the

stock market? How threatening is climate change? Can I trust genetically modified
food or additives? In the real world, we usually deal with situations of high uncer-
tainty. But even when people are given numbers such as the likelihood of side effects
for a medical treatment or of winning in a gambling situation, some uncertainty
remains, and one’s reasoning may not be “rational” in a mathematical sense.
Psychological aspects of risk and risk analysis were first systematically studied
in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when economists treated people as rational decision-
makers or “economic men” who make choices based on cost-benefit analyses. For
decades, economic theories on human risk taking behavior were based on the
assumption that human beings behave logically. However, most people do not
engage in statistical analyses when they judge risks in their daily lives, instead rely-
ing on more “human tools.” From the experienced firefighter who trusts his intuition
based on years of learning to the child who is able to cross a busy street by using a
simple rule of thumb, human beings have amazing abilities which guide them
through the uncertainties of life. Consider the development of self-driving cars. This
technology can make our streets safer and dispense with human cognitive limita-
tions that are often the cause of accidents. At the same time, however, it is extremely
challenging for the developers to integrate all possibilities inherent to the road envi-
ronment and teach the car what to do in unusual situations. While a machine can
easily learn how to judge the speed of approaching cars or to remain alert for bikes
and pedestrians, it fails to make judgments in unclear situations that may ask for a
small violation of traffic rules (e.g., in construction zones). In situations of uncer-
tainty, humans have developed adaptive strategies that are sometimes better than
machine-based algorithms—but may in other instances lead them astray.
When investigating human risk judgments, it makes a difference whether one
looks at subjective risk perception or risk taking behavior. A base jumper might
judge the risk of the activity at hand as high, but still jump; a person who is afraid
of flying might judge the risk of flying as low, but not enter an airplane. Likewise,
most smokers are well aware that smoking can cause cancer, but this awareness
does not seem to prevent them from smoking. Psychological research has identified
several factors that influence the perception and judgment of risks as well as risk
taking behavior. This volume highlights how individual differences (Part I) and situ-
ational circumstances (Part II) influence risk perception and risk taking behavior.
Behavioral models of human decision making under risk and the challenge of inte-
grating different approaches and theories are discussed in Part III. This volume also
gives an overview of practical implications for risk communication (Part IV) and in
the areas of industry, policy, and research (Part V). This book aims at a broader audi-
ence beyond the field of scientific psychology; therefore, the chapters include many
vivid examples to illustrate theoretical concepts. Each chapter also gives practical
implications.
Individuals or groups of people differ in the way they perceive risk and in their
willingness to take risk, which is the focus of Part I. The authors of Chap. 1, Marco
Lauriola and Joshua Weller, review numerous studies on the relationship between
risk taking and personality traits. This chapter gives a systematic overview on why
Preface ix
some people take more risks than others. The authors discuss different approaches
of measuring risk taking, from self-reported behaviors to choice-based tasks. They
also distinguish between risk-related personality traits such as sensation-seeking or
impulsivity and general personality traits such as those included in the Big 5 person-
ality inventories. They further include different domains such as recreational risks,
social risks, ethical risks, health and safety risks, and gambling and financial risk
taking. The chapter concludes with the argument that there is no single risk taking
personality trait, but rather risk taking can be explained by the interplay of various
traits and emotional states. The author of Chap. 2, Bruno Chauvin, reviews studies
on the influence of sociodemographic characteristics, cultural orientation, and level
of expertise on the judgment of risks. Based on a large body of research, he dis-
cusses the influence of sex and race, phenomena such as “the white male effect,”
and the role of power in decision making. Further, Chauvin introduces studies on
culture and risk perception, which has especially received attention in the literature
within the cultural cognition theory of risk, and differences between experts and
laypeople’s risk judgments. In Chap. 3, Vivianne Visschers and Michael Siegrist
also look at the perceptions of experts versus laypeople, but focus specifically on
differences between hazards as laid out in a psychometric paradigm. The authors
discuss how potential hazards are sometimes perceived as more dangerous by the
public than experts and how the public’s risk perception is often shaped by factors
such as perceived benefit, trust, knowledge, affective associations, values, and fair-
ness. Based on studies in various areas such as gene modification or climate change,
they offer practical implications for risk management and communication.
In Part II, cognitive, emotional and social influences on human risk perception
and risk taking are considered. In Chap. 4, Rebecca Helm and Valerie Reyna take a
cognitive perspective on risk taking and also consider developmental and neurobio-
logical research. The authors discuss Prospect Theory, dual process theories, Fuzzy
Trace Theory, and Construal Level Theory. They point out how framing and mental
representations of risk influence judgment and behavior and consider neural under-
pinnings of risk taking. Chapter 5, by Mary Kate Tompkins, Pär Bjälkebring, and
Ellen Peters, gives an overview of current research on the role of affect and emotion
in risk perception. The risk perception literature makes a primary distinction
between risk as feelings and risk as analysis, and psychologists have pointed out the
importance of feelings when judging risks. The authors thereby focus on the affect
heuristic and the appraisal-tendency framework. Chapter 6, by Eric Eller and Dieter
Frey, is centered around social influences on risk perception and risk behavior.
Group influences, which have long been studied in social psychology, also affect
decisions under risk, especially in professional contexts such as teamwork. The
chapter points out how groups may hinder adequate risk identification, risk analysis,
and decision making. The authors end the chapter with a set of recommendations to
overcome these group barriers.
Part III especially focuses on observed human behavior, which is described in
behavioral models of risk taking. In Chap. 7, Martina Raue and Sabine Scholl point
to the challenges of considering many pieces of information or deciding under time
pressure. As a result of these limitations, people simplify decision processes and use
x Preface
rules of thumb or heuristics. The authors thereby focus on two approaches: the heu-
ristics and biases program and the fast and frugal heuristics. In Chap. 8, Michael
Birnbaum gives a systematic overview of behavioral models of risk taking, which
are theories that describe human behavior in decisions that involve risk. While a
normative model describes behavior as it ought to be in relation to an observed risk,
a behavioral model describes behavior as it has been observed. In Chap. 9, Cvetomir
Dimov and Julian Marewski discuss the challenges of theory integration. The
authors argue that psychological researchers often aim at explaining the human
mind without crossing the borders of their individual subdisciplines. They therefore
call for more attention to theory integration. Readers may become aware of this
issue when reading through the chapters of this volume that discuss sometimes
competing approaches and theories. In this chapter, a method—cognitive architec-
tures—is introduced to systematically integrate existing theories and empirical find-
ings. The authors use two competing theoretical approaches of decision making
under uncertainty—the heuristics and biases program and fast and frugal heuristics
(introduced in Chap. 7)—to demonstrate how cognitive architectures work. In Chap.
10, Bernhard Streicher, Eric Eller, and Sonja Zimmermann point out limitations of
existing approaches to handling risk and uncertainty. To overcome these limitations,
they introduce a model of risk culture, which serves as an integrative framework for
different theories of risk perception and behavior, as a reference point for holistic
measurements, and as a starting point for evidence-based interventions.
Part IV is centered around risk communication and starts with Chap. 11, in which
Ann Bostrom, Gisela Böhm, and Robert O’Connor discuss principles and chal-
lenges of communicating risks. They describe key components of risk information
processing, including exposure and attention, understanding, evaluation, and behav-
ioral response. The authors explore influences on each of these components and
focus on the roles of uncertainty, mental models, choice architecture, and habits. In
Chap. 12, Ulrich Hoffrage and Rocio Garcia-Retamero note that “risks are unavoid-
able, but poor risk communication and misunderstanding are really unnecessary.”
The authors make several suggestions on how to improve risk communication in the
health sector and focus on the interpretation of test results, the use of natural fre-
quencies and visual aids, the difference between relative and absolute risk reduc-
tion, and the meaning of survival rates. In Chap. 13, Tamar Krishnamurti and Wändi
Bruine de Bruin also focus on health risks and summarize four lessons learned for
effective health risk communication on an organizational level. The four lessons
include accessibility, appropriate delivery methods, pre-tests of communication
practices, and the collaboration of interdisciplinary teams. All chapters in Part IV
point to the importance of matching the risk communication strategy to the target
audience’s goals, attributes, and mental model of the world they live in.
While all the chapters include a section on practical implications, the chapters in
Part V are specifically centered around this aspect. In Chap. 14, Eva Lermer,
Bernhard Streicher, and Martina Raue give an overview of recent research on mea-
suring subjective risk estimates. It is of high practical importance for both research-
ers and practitioners to understand how risk perception can be measured and
especially how it may vary depending on the measurement used. In Chap. 15,
Preface xi
insights on risk and uncertainty in the insurance industry are given by Rainer Sachs.
This chapter is an overview of the professional work of risk managers. The author
outlines how their methods and tools have developed historically from experience-
based methods to mathematical models. He describes the limits of these models and
challenges in the face of emerging risks and uncertainty. This volume closes with
Chap. 16, in which Ortwin Renn summarizes implications of psychological aspects
of risk perception for policy and government. He stresses that human risk percep-
tion may differ from statistical assessment of risks, but needs to be valued as an
indicator for individual and societal concerns that require attention.
Theory integration is often challenging in scientific research (see Chap. 9 for a
discussion), but the reader will notice that the chapters of this volume often overlap,
demonstrating that various aspects, findings, and theories in the field of risk are
integrated and acknowledged by the authors. The chapters also nicely complement
one another. In that line, most chapters include cross-references within the book that
can be used to gain a deeper understanding of concepts, models, and research
findings.
It was a pleasure for us to work with outstanding authors who have shared their
excitement about this book. All of them have been extremely motivated, dedicated,
and open-minded. We cannot thank our contributors enough for making this book a
very rewarding and successful project. We would also like to thank our wonderful
editor at Springer, Morgan Ryan, who was exceptionally supportive during every
step of this project.
Cambridge, MA, USA Martina Raue

Munich, Germany Eva Lermer
Hall in Tyrol, Austria Bernhard Streicher
Contents
Part I Individual Differences in Risk Perception

and Risk Taking Behavior
1 Personality and Risk: Beyond Daredevils— Risk Taking
from a Temperament Perspective�� 3
Marco Lauriola and Joshua Weller
2 Individual Differences in the Judgment of Risks:
Sociodemographic Characteristics, Cultural Orientation,
and Level of Expertise �� 37
Bruno Chauvin
3 Differences in Risk Perception Between Hazards
and Between Individuals �� 63
Vivianne H. M. Visschers and Michael Siegrist
Part II Cognitive, Emotional and Social Perspectives on Risk

4 Cognitive, Developmental, and Neurobiological
Aspects of Risk Judgments�� 83
Rebecca K. Helm and Valerie F. Reyna
5 Emotional Aspects of Risk Perceptions�� 109
Mary Kate Tompkins, Pär Bjälkebring, and Ellen Peters
6 The Group Effect: Social Influences on Risk Identification,
Analysis, and Decision Making�� 131
Eric Eller and Dieter Frey
Part III Modeling Decision Making under Risk

7 The Use of Heuristics in Decision Making Under Risk
and Uncertainty�� 153
Martina Raue and Sabine G. Scholl
xiii
xiv Contents
8 Behavioral Models of Decision Making Under Risk�� 181

Michael H. Birnbaum
9 Cognitive Architectures as Scaffolding for Risky Choice Models �� 201
Cvetomir M. Dimov and Julian N. Marewski
10 Risk Culture: An Alternative Approach to Handling Risks�� 217
Bernhard Streicher, Eric Eller, and Sonja Zimmermann
Part IV Communicating Risks to the Public

11 Communicating Risks: Principles and Challenges �� 251
Ann Bostrom, Gisela Böhm, and Robert E. O’Connor
12 Improving Understanding of Health-Relevant
Numerical Information�� 279
Ulrich Hoffrage and Rocio Garcia-Retamero
13 Developing Health Risk Communications:
Four Lessons Learned �� 299
Tamar Krishnamurti and Wändi Bruine de Bruin
Part V Practical Implications for Industry, Policy and Research

14 Measuring Subjective Risk Estimates�� 313
Eva Lermer, Bernhard Streicher, and Martina Raue
15 Risk and Uncertainty in the Insurance Industry�� 329
Rainer Sachs
16 Implications for Risk Governance�� 345
Ortwin Renn
Index�� 371
Contributors
Michael H. Birnbaum Decision Research Center, California State University,

Fullerton, CA, USA
Gisela Böhm Department of Psychosocial Science, Faculty of Psychology,
University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
Department of Psychology, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences,
Lillehammer, Norway
Pär Bjälkebring Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg,
Sweden
Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
Ann Bostrom Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, University
of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Wändi Bruine de Bruin Centre for Decision Research, Leeds University Business
School, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University,
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Bruno Chauvin University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France
Cvetomir M. Dimov Department of Organizational Behavior, Faculty of Business
and Economics, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Eric Eller Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich,
Munich, Germany
Dieter Frey Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich,
Munich, Germany
xv
xvi Contributors
Rocio Garcia-Retamero Department of Experimental Psychology, University of

Granada, Granada, Spain
Rebecca K. Helm University of Exeter Law School, Exeter, UK
Ulrich Hoffrage Department of Organizational Behavior, Faculty of Business and
Economics, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
Tamar Krishnamurti Division of General Internal Medicine, University of
Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University,
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Marco Lauriola Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, University
of Rome “Sapienza”, Rome, Italy
Eva Lermer Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Regensburg,
Regensburg, Germany
FOM University of Applied Sciences for Economics and Management, Munich,
Germany
Julian N. Marewski Department of Organizational Behavior, Faculty of Business
and Economics, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
Robert E. O’Connor Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate,
National Science Foundation, Alexandria, VA, USA
Ellen Peters Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus,
OH, USA
Martina Raue AgeLab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA,
USA
Ortwin Renn Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam, Germany
Valerie F. Reyna Human Neuroscience Institute, Cornell Magnetic Resonance
Imaging Facility, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Rainer Sachs Munich Reinsurance Company, Integrated Risk Management,
Munich, Germany
Sabine G. Scholl School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim, Mannheim,
Germany
Michael Siegrist Institute for Environmental Decision Making, Consumer
Behavior, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Bernhard Streicher Institute of Psychology, UMIT - Private University for Health
Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology, Hall in Tyrol, Austria
Contributors xvii
Mary Kate Tompkins Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University,

Columbus, OH, USA
Vivianne H. M. Visschers School of Applied Psychology, University of Applied
Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW), Olten, Switzerland
Joshua Weller Department of Developmental Psychology, Tilburg University,
Tilburg, Netherlands
Sonja Zimmermann Institute of Psychology, UMIT - Private University for
Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology, Hall in Tyrol, Austria
About the Editors
Martina Raue is a Research Scientist at the MIT AgeLab in Cambridge,

Massachusetts and an Instructor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard
University. She studies risk perception and decision making over the lifespan, with
a focus on the roles of time and emotion. She applies theories from social psychol-
ogy to challenges and risks of longevity and examines ways to improve planning
and preparing for later life. Dr. Raue received her Ph.D. in social psychology from
the Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich in Germany and her master’s degree in
psychology from the University of Basel in Switzerland.
Eva Lermer is a Professor of Business Psychology at the FOM University of

Applied Sciences for Economics and Management in Munich, Germany, and a
Research Scientist at the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University
of Regensburg, Germany. Her research interests include subjective risk assessment,
decision making, and de-biasing strategies. In addition to her scientific research,
Professor Lermer works as a consultant for profit and nonprofit organizations. She
received her academic degrees from the University of Salzburg in Austria and the
Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich in Germany.
Bernhard Streicher is a Full Professor of Social and Personality Psychology and

Head of the Department of Psychology and Medical Sciences at the University for
Health Sciences—UMIT in Hall, Tyrol, Austria. His research interests include the
psychological mechanisms of decision making under risk and uncertainty and the
question of how to enhance the risk competencies of people and organizations. In
addition to his scientific research, Professor Streicher works as a lecturer and con-
sultant regarding the topic of “risk” for profit and nonprofit organizations. Professor
Streicher received his academic titles from the Ludwig-Maximilian University
Munich in Germany.
xix
xx About the Editors
Martina Raue, Eva Lermer, and Bernhard Streicher jointly founded the
Risikolabor (risk lab) at the Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich in 2011. While
currently based at different institutions, they continue to collaborate on various
research projects investigating human perception of risk and influences on risk tak-
ing behavior. In addition, they offer consulting and workshops on the topic. More
about their work can be found at www.risikolabor.org.
Part I
Individual Differences in Risk Perception
and Risk Taking Behavior
Chapter 1
Personality and Risk: Beyond Daredevils—
Risk Taking from a Temperament Perspective
Marco Lauriola and Joshua Weller
Abstract We reviewed studies relating risk taking to personality traits. This search
long has been elusive due to the large number of definitions of risk and to the variety
of personality traits associated with risk taking in different forms and domains. In
order to reconcile inconsistent findings, we categorized risk taking measures into
self-report behavior inventories, self-report trait-based scales, and choice-based
tasks. Likewise, we made a distinction between specific risk-related traits (e.g., sen-
sation seeking, impulsivity) and more general traits (e.g., the Big Five). Sensation
seeking aspects like thrill and experience seeking were more strongly associated
with recreational and social risks that trigger emotional arousal. Impulsivity was
associated with ethical, health safety, gambling, and financial risk taking, due to
disregard of future consequences and to lack of self-control. Among the Big Five,
extraversion and openness to experience were associated with risk seeking; whereas
conscientiousness and agreeableness had more established links with risk aversion.
Neuroticism facets, like anxiety and worry, had negative relationships with risk
seeking; other facets, like anger and depression, promoted risk seeking. We con-
cluded that the notion of a unidimensional “risk taking” trait seems misleading. The
interplay of many traits encompassed in an overarching temperament model best
represented personality-risk relations. Positive emotionality traits promoted risky
behaviors that confer an emotionally rewarding experience to the person. Negative
emotionality traits lead to heightened perceptions of danger, primarily motivating
the avoidance of risk. The last disinhibition affected risk taking as a result of differ-
ences in self-control control acting upon momentary feelings and in self-interest.
Potential applications for practitioners are also discussed.
M. Lauriola (*)
Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, University of Rome “Sapienza”,
Rome, Italy
e-mail: marco.lauriola@uniroma1.it
J. Weller
Department of Developmental Psychology, Tilburg University, Tilburg, Netherlands
© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 3

M. Raue et al. (eds.), Psychological Perspectives on Risk and Risk Analysis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92478-6_1
4 M. Lauriola and J. Weller
For decades, the construct of risk taking has captured the attention of researchers
from a multitude of disciplines, including clinicians, psychologists, and economists.
Understanding who is more likely to take a risk has clear implications for one’s
financial, social, and personal well-being, as well as society in general. For instance,
conceptualizing how individuals who engage in risky behaviors arrive at decisions
can help to pinpoint identifying the underlying mechanisms that mediate maladap-
tive decision making processes. Additionally, identifying who is more likely to take
a risk can improve risk communication efforts by means of tailored messages high-
lighting goals and values that are important to them.
However, the notion of a “risk taker” appears to be more complex than a singular
category that can apply to behaviors spanning across a variety of different contexts.
In fact, there has been some disagreement reflecting the degree to which risk taking
tendencies are dispositional in nature. For those who indeed consider it to be dispo-
sitional, scholars have been divided about whether risk taking is better conceptual-
ized as a unitary trait or as a domain-specific phenomenon. On the one hand, traits
like sensation seeking and impulsivity were long thought to represent the personal-
ity basis of risk taking across different types of behaviors and situations (e.g.,
Enticott & Ogloff, 2006; Zuckerman & Kuhlman, 2000). On the other hand, sup-
porters of a domain-specific approach suggest that risk behaviors may be qualita-
tively different from one another (e.g., Anderson & Mellor, 2009; Hanoch, Johnson,
& Wilke, 2006; Soane & Chmiel, 2005; Weber, Blais, & Betz, 2002). Subsequently,
different personality variables may uniquely account for variance across specific
risk domains. For instance, Weller and Tikir (2011) found that dispositional hon-
esty/humility predicted ethical and health risk taking, but not social or recreational
risk taking. From this lens, a domain-specificity account of risk neither precludes
the possibility that broader dispositional factors are associated with specific risk
domains, nor does it necessarily rule out that stable overarching preferences for risk
taking exist. Domain-specific risk taking studies often yield positive intercorrela-
tions among risk propensity in different domains, as well as significant correlations
between risk propensity and personality (e.g., Dohmen et al., 2011; Highhouse,
Nye, Zhang, & Rada, 2016; Nicholson, Soane, Fenton-O’Creevy, & Willman, 2005;
Weber et al., 2002; Weller, Ceschi, & Randolph, 2015a; Weller & Tikir, 2011).
Additionally, test-retest correlations for risk taking demonstrate considerable tem-
poral stability, up to 2 years (e.g., Chuang & Schechter, 2015, Table 1). These find-
ings suggest that not only do stable individual differences in risk behaviors exists
but also that broader personality traits may be associated with these behaviors.
Acknowledging that risk behaviors may be both domain-specific and multiply-
determined, the current chapter proposes that individual differences in risk propen-
sity can be best understood within the context of a broader, hierarchical personality
framework, with each broad personality trait influencing some aspect of risk taking.
Based on its theoretical ties to emotional and cognitive control processes, we orga-
nize our discussion around a “Big Three,” or temperament-based, framework (e.g.,
Clark & Watson, 2008; Tellegen & Waller, 2008). Adult temperament models stress
that the broadest dimensions, extraversion/positive emotionality (extraversion),
neuroticism/negative emotionality (neuroticism), and disinhibition vs. constraint
1 Personality and Risk: Beyond Daredevils–Risk Taking from a Temperament… 5
(disinhibition), are affect-relevant traits. Because of this theoretical link, tempera-

ment models converge with advances in the behavioral decision literature that high-
lights the interplay between affective and cognitive processes, in the appraisal of
risk and decision making in general (e.g., Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, & Welch,
2001; Rusting, 2001; Slovic & Peters, 2006; Weber & Johnson, 2009).
The aims of this chapter are threefold. First, we address the issue of differences
in conceptual definitions of risk taking and their corresponding operational defini-
tions across disciplines, we believe, have hindered reaching common ground in this
area (cf. Fox & Tannenbaum, 2011). Second, we briefly review the literature on
traits that has demonstrated a link between personality and risk taking. Specifically,
we examine the constructs of sensation seeking and impulsivity, as well as broad,
higher-order trait dimensions (i.e., Big Five). Finally, we propose that these findings
might be partly reconciled by framing the reviewed studies in terms of a Big Three
model, linking personality traits to risk behaviors.
efinitions of Risk and Construct Validity of Risk-Related

D
Traits
Like many constructs, the risk taking literature is no stranger to numerous theoreti-
cal and, therefore, operational definitions. Many different measures may exist, but it
is unclear whether they assess the same construct. At best, research would yield
moderate to strong correlations across different assessments; at worst, there would
be no convergence across the different paradigms, suggesting that these variables
may all assess different processes and perhaps constructs.
Choice-Based Experimental Tasks
One straightforward definition of risk taking, from an economic and financial per-
spective, is the tendency to choose an option that has a greater outcome variance
than another option. From this perspective, a risky choice may not necessarily be
associated with a negative outcome or a problem behavior. One of the first methods
to quantify risk taking involved using one-shot, hypothetical gambles, eliciting a
choice between a small number of options – usually between an uncertain, or risky,
option (50% chance to win $10, otherwise win $0) and a certain option (100%
chance to win $5 for sure). Proponents of this method assert that it provides an ana-
logue for how individuals use and integrate specific contextual information about a
risky decision (e.g., the magnitude of the outcome and the probability that the out-
come will be realized. These studies have been instrumental in demonstrating a gap
between how people actually approach risky choices (e.g., prospect theory) and how
a normatively rational actor would approach them (cf., Goldstein & Weber, 1995;
Lopes, 1995, see also Birnbaum, Chap. 8).
Hypothetical gambles still are common in behavioral economics, based on the

assumption that financial risk taking, and risk taking in general, can be modeled
almost exclusively as maximizing the expectation of some individual utility func-
tion that maps on a cardinal scale the subjective value of each available choice
option (cf., Friedman, Isaac, James, & Sunder, 2014; Takemura, 2014). Unfortunately,
however, expected utility assessments of risk attitude have demonstrated limited
predictive validity outside the laboratory or field context in which they were elicited
(Anderson & Mellor, 2009; Dohmen et al., 2011; Friedman et al., 2014; Schonberg,
Fox, & Poldrack, 2011; Weber et al., 2002). Moreover, the average risk taking pat-
tern elicited by hypothetical gambles for which outcomes and probabilities are
clearly stated before making a decision (i.e., a description-based decision) can differ
from the pattern resulting from situations for which outcomes and probabilities are
learned by experience (e.g., offering the decision makers a probability sampling or
providing them with a feedback on their choices; Barron & Erev, 2003; Hertwig,
Barron, Weber, & Erev, 2004; Hertwig & Erev, 2009; Schonberg et al., 2011). This
knowledge has motivated researchers to develop behavioral paradigms that more
adequately capture the psychological experience of risk. New paradigms have
become increasingly popular, especially within the clinical neuropsychological lit-
erature (Schonberg et al., 2011; Weber & Johnson, 2009). Though not an exhaustive
list, representative examples include the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT; Bechara,
Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994), the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART;
Lejuez et al., 2002), and the Columbia Card Task (CCT; Figner, Mackinlay,
Wilkening, & Weber, 2009).
Tasks like IGT, BART, and CCT involve making repeated decisions in the face of
uncertainty and directly experiencing the consequences of their choices. For
instance, participants taking the IGT are asked to draw cards from four available
decks differing in payoff size and structure. Two risk disadvantageous decks confer
higher rewards on most trials but also very big losses on some trials, with a negative
long-term expected value. The other two decks are risk advantageous, conferring
lower rewards on most trials but only occasional small losses, with a positive long-
term expected value. In order to perform well on this task, the participants must
learn which decks are more advantageous, indeed drawing more cards for them than
from disadvantageous decks. Another prominent task used to assess risk taking ten-
dencies is BART. On this task participants are asked to inflate a virtual balloon
displayed on a computer screen by pressing a pump button. Each click inflates the
balloon and transfers $0.05 to a temporary account. Participants are informed that
the balloon can explode after each pump, erasing the money earned on the trial.
However, if they stop pumping, they earn all of the points accrued for that balloon.
As each pump is a gamble, which confers an additional reward but also involves
increased risk (i.e., the chance of the balloon popping becomes greater), participants
must learn about the stochastic structure of the task in order to perform well. The
last risk task that we briefly review is the CCT. On this task participants take repeated
trials in which they are presented with 32 cards presented face down and they are
instructed to sequentially turn over them. Like BART pumps, every choice is
rewarded, unless one turns a loss card. Different from IGT and BART, the CCT
offers to the decision precise information about the magnitude of gains, losses, and
the associated probabilities. Indeed, the effect of learning is more limited for this
task, and this perhaps makes the CCT a more refined and decomposable measure of
risk taking tendencies than IGT and BART.
Although such paradigms differ in the types of decisions that are made, they col-
lectively represent a major step toward developing a body of literature that appreci-
ates the nuanced processes that may operate in guiding decision making across
different risk contexts. Inspired by the pioneering work using the IGT to explicate
decision making deficits in patients with neurological damage to the prefrontal cor-
tex and amygdala, researchers have demonstrated the promise of showing differ-
ences between individuals with clinical diagnoses (e.g., substance use disorder) and
healthy comparisons, as well as age-related differences in decision making (e.g.,
Bornovalova, Daughters, Hernandez, Richards, & Lejuez, 2005; Brevers, Bechara,
Cleeremans, & Noël, 2013; Coffey, Schumacher, Baschnagel, Hawk, & Holloman,
2011; Kräplin et al., 2014). Specifically, these tasks also have led to insights into the
neural correlates of risk behavior and how the development of these systems may
impact risk taking tendencies over the lifespan (e.g., Bechara, Damasio, Damasio,
& Lee, 1999; Gladwin, Figner, Crone, & Wiers, 2011; Paulsen, Carter, Platt, Huettel,
& Brannon, 2011).
Self-Report Behavior Approaches
In contrast to a financial-based definition of risk taking based on variance, self-

report methods define risk taking largely as problem behaviors that have the poten-
tial for negative consequences for the person (e.g., externalizing, addiction,
gambling, unhealthy habits, etc.). One method involves directly asking individuals
about their present or past risk behaviors, perceptions of risks, or the likelihood
that one would engage in a behavior in the future. Some researchers have used a
single survey question, asking about risk taking globally (e.g., “Are you generally
a person who is fully prepared to take risks, or do you try to avoid taking risks?”;
Dohmen et al., 2011), or have included global assessments across risk taking
domains, such as recreation or health (e.g., “Please could you tell us if any of the
following risks have ever applied to you, now or in your adult past?”; Dohmen
et al., 2011; Nicholson et al., 2005). More refined measures have expanded on the
behavioral self-report approach, including multi-item scales that are designed to
provide more precision in the measurement of domain-specific risk taking. For
instance, the domain-specific risk taking (DOSPERT; Blais & Weber, 2006; Weber
et al., 2002,) provides a multidimensional measure across six broad risk domains:
social (e.g., asking an employer for a raise), recreation (e.g., skydiving), invest-
ment (e.g., investing in a speculative stock), gambling (e.g., betting a portion of
income on a sporting event), health/safety (e.g., drinking too much alcohol at a
party), and ethics (e.g., cheating on a tax return). Another domain-specific inven-
tory, the passive risk taking scale (PRT; Keinan & Bereby-Meyer, 2012), assesses
one’s acceptance of risk due to inaction or omission of control across three domains:
resource inaction (e.g., checking the credit card statements monthly), medical
(e.g., flu vaccinations), and ethical domains (e.g., not say anything when receiving
too much change at the store). Although these self-report measures tend to better
predict outcomes than do one-shot experimental gambles, some skepticism remains
on whether this difference reflects common method variance and redundancy
between scale and outcomes in survey research (e.g., Anderson & Mellor, 2009;
Charness, Gneezy, & Imas, 2013; Lönnqvist, Verkasalo, Walkowitz, & Wichardt,
2015; Nicholson et al., 2005).
Self-Report Trait-Based Approaches
Personality researchers interested in better understanding individual differences in

risk taking have developed constructs, and corresponding scales, that are believed to
represent the affective, cognitive, and behavioral indicators that predispose one to
engage in risk behaviors. These indicators often include elements of preferences
toward uncertainty, thrill and excitement seeking, harm avoidance, impulsiveness,
and even the engagement in specific risk behaviors. For example, risk taking scales
from the Jackson Personality Inventory (JPI; Jackson, 1994) and the Personality
Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5; Krueger, Derringer, Markon, Watson, & Skodol,
2012) provide a total score that assumes variation on a single underlying factor. In
contrast, scales like the Stimulating-Instrumental Risk Inventory (SIRI; Zaleskiewicz,
2001) or the RT-18 (de Haan et al., 2011) are based on personality items akin to
existing sensation seeking and impulsivity measures and consider risk taking ten-
dencies as a multidimensional phenomenon.
It should be noted that personality-like items are sometimes included in risk tak-
ing inventories, and risk-related trait scales elicit endorsements of engaging in spe-
cific risk behaviors (e.g., “I have tried marijuana, or would like to”; “I would like to
go scuba diving”; Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978), or conversely, some
items ask whether a person likes to take risks but does not clearly define what a risk
is. Nonetheless, no current broad-based personality model considers risk taking as
a broad, orthogonal dimension, per se. Rather, several lower-order traits presumably
related to risk taking appear in larger-scale personality inventories, like the NEO-
PI-R (i.e., excitement seeking, impulsiveness, anxiety, anger, openness to actions;
Costa & McCrae, 2008), the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (i.e.,
harm avoidance; Tellegen & Waller, 2008), the Temperament and Character
Inventory (i.e., exploratory excitability, impulsiveness, harm avoidance; Cloninger,
Przybeck, Svakic, & Wetzel, 1994), and the Hogan Personality Inventory (i.e., thrill
seeking, experience seeking, impulse control; Hogan & Hogan, 1995). Additionally,
items related to sensation seeking, impulsiveness, and risk taking also appear in the
extraversion scale on the Eysenck Personality Inventory (Eysenck, Eysenck, &
Barrett, 1985). Other personality inventories like the HEXACO-PI (Lee & Ashton,
2004) also include facets, such as unconventionality, social boldness, prudence, or
anxiety, along with the higher-order honesty-humility dimension, which may also
contribute to risk taking, especially in the social, ethical, and health risk taking
domains (e.g., Weller & Tikir, 2011).
Risk-related traits like impulsivity or sensation seeking have been long and
extensively studied as predictors of a variety of real-world problem behaviors, such
as reckless driving, health-risking sexual behaviors, gambling, alcoholism, and
unethical behaviors (e.g., Chambers & Potenza, 2003; DeAndrea, Carpenter,
Shulman, & Levine, 2009; Dahlen, Martin, Ragan, & Kuhlman, 2005; De Wit,
2009; Gullone & Moore, 2000; Hittner & Swickert, 2006; Hoyle, Fejfar, & Miller,
2000; Nelson, Lust, Story, & Ehlinger, 2008). Likewise, the degree to which differ-
ent traits are associated with risk taking as a function of domains has recently been
addressed using the DOSPERT or other multidimensional domain-specific mea-
sures (e.g., Gullone & Moore, 2000; Romero, Villar, Gómez-Fraguela, & López-
Romero, 2012; Soane, Dewberry, & Narendran, 2010; Weller & Tikir, 2011;
Zaleskiewicz, 2001).
Personality and Risk Taking
Because economists and psychologists from different subdisciplines have defined

and measured risk in varied ways, mixed findings have arisen from using the same
label (i.e., risk) for entirely different variables assessed in empirical studies (i.e.,
behavioral decision paradigms, behavioral self-report, or trait-based approaches).
However, emerging from this lack of consensus is an increasing awareness that a
unidimensional risk taking trait may not adequately explain individual differences
in risk taking. As we will demonstrate in the following sections, research has
strongly provided evidence that suggests that personality traits are correlated with
specific types of risks. Moreover, these findings provide the foundation for consid-
ering risk taking within the context of a broader personality framework.
In this section, we briefly review some of the most commonly used personality
indicators of risk behaviors. Specifically, we focus on two constructs, sensation
seeking and impulsivity, as well as broader personality dimensions. Both sensation
seeking and impulsivity are often deemed the traits that best represent a generalized
latent disposition capable to motivate risk taking across domains and situations
(e.g., Enticott & Ogloff, 2006; Zuckerman & Kuhlman, 2000). Though often treated
as unidimensional constructs, the multidimensional nature of these constructs can
help to better place dispositional risk taking tendencies within the context of a tem-
perament model of personality. For instance, facets of both sensation seeking and
impulsivity are similar to other narrow traits in commonly used personality invento-
ries and belong to broader and relatively orthogonal personality dimensions (Anusic,
Schimmack, Pinkus, & Lockwood, 2009; Markon, Krueger, & Watson, 2005;
Sharma, Markon, & Clark, 2014).
A temperament approach offers researchers several advantages. First, research
has increasingly recognized that self-reports in temperament reflect underlying neu-
robiological mechanisms that are responsible for an individual’s experience of

positive and negative affect (e.g., Derringer et al., 2010; DeYoung, 2010; Munafo,
Clark, & Flint, 2005; Reuter, Schmitz, Corr, & Hennig, 2007). Second, tempera-
ment is proposed to have a developmental history. Research has suggested that
childhood temperament is linked to individual differences in temperament as an
adult (e.g., Rothbart & Ahadi, 1994). Last, self-reported adult temperament has
been found to be stable over time (Bazana, Stelmack, & Stelmack, 2004, for a meta-
analysis of the stability of temperament traits). Thus, the temperament dimensions
can be said to be enduring, stable dispositions, a feature that matches nicely with the
search for stable risk preferences (cf. Fox & Tannenbaum, 2011).
Sensation Seeking and Risk Taking
Personality psychologists’ interest in risk taking dispositions has grown due to the
seminal work of Zuckerman and colleagues, who defined the sensation seeking trait
as individual differences “in the seeking of varied, novel, complex, and intense sen-
sations and experiences, and the willingness to take physical, social, legal, and
financial risks for the sake of such experience” (Zuckerman, 1994, p. 27). From this
perspective, risk taking is not a primary trait characteristic, but rather a reflection of
seeking situations that satisfy one’s need for arousal, excitement, novelty, and
change, which often, but not necessarily, involve elements of risk.
Versions of the Sensation Seeking Scale (currently SSS-V is the most popular;
Zuckerman et al., 1978) have been extensively used in personality-risk research (see
Roberti, 2004 for a review). The SSS-V not only provides a global score that char-
acterizes relative levels of overall sensation seeking but also includes four subscales:
thrill and adventure seeking (e.g., involvement in risky sports), disinhibition (e.g.,
involvement in wild parties or uncontrolled situations), experience seeking (e.g.,
involvement in novel, strange, or unusual activities), and boredom susceptibility
(e.g., constant need for arousal).
Before reviewing specific facets of sensation seeking, it is worth noting that peo-
ple scoring high on the SSS-V total score typically approach risky situations with
more self-confidence and good feelings compared to people who report lower scores
on these scales (Horvath & Zuckerman, 1993; Zuckerman, 1994). Thus, beyond the
popular view that sensation seekers are involved in risk taking for the mere sake of
stimulating experiences, the literature also suggests that they place greater hedonic
value on exciting activities. Consistent with an “affect heuristic” account, those who
have good feelings toward a hazard or activity situation tend to perceive it as safer
and expect greater benefits from it, thus increasing the likelihood of engaging in risk
taking (e.g., Finucane, Alhakami, Slovic, & Johnson, 2000; Hanoch et al., 2006;
Slovic, Finucane, Peters, & MacGregor, 2004; Weber et al., 2002). According to
Zuckerman (2007), sensation seekers are likely to take risks across different domains
(e.g., physical, social, legal, and financial risks). In one study, Zuckerman and
Kuhlman (2000) tested the generality of sensation seeking-risk relations across six
types of behaviors (smoking, drinking, drugs, sex, driving, and gambling), each
assessed by self-reported direct measures of risk taking. Higher overall sensation
seeking scores were significantly correlated with all risky behaviors, except gam-
bling and risky driving. In terms of construct validity, the study showed that a com-
mon personality factor linked sensation seeking tendencies to different types of risk.
Roberti (2004) carried out a comprehensive review of the risky behaviors for which
sensation seekers typically engage. Effect sizes tended to be medium to large for
overall sensation seeking scores with substance use, gambling, reckless driving, and
risky sexual experiences (e.g., multiple partners, unprotected sex, younger age for
the first sexual intercourse, etc.), though were only considered medium in size for
involvement in risky sports (e.g., extreme sports).
Because the need for arousal and stimulating experiences is a linchpin of the
construct, risky choices that are more emotionally engaging are believed to demon-
strate stronger correlations with sensation seeking. Supporting this assertion,
Zaleskiewicz (2001) found that sensation seeking predicted self-reported “stimulat-
ing” risk behaviors (i.e., motivated by the need for arousal, e.g., skydiving, bungee
jumping, or scuba diving), but “instrumental” risk behaviors (i.e., risks needed to
reach some important future goal, e.g., business or financial decisions) were less
strongly associated with sensation seeking. Similarly, decisions from description
(e.g., hypothetical one-shot gambles, no experience of consequences) might lack
the necessary element of arousal that rewards the decision maker and, thus, lower
observed correlations between risk taking and sensation seeking (Zuckerman,
2007). However, as the activity or task becomes more of a decision from experience
(e.g., BART, the affective or “hot” version of the CCT), sensation seeking would be
predicted to demonstrate stronger correlations with behavior, corresponding with
increases in autonomic arousal (Schonberg et al., 2011). Consistent with this view,
Figner et al. (2009) found that the need for arousal scores, a construct closely related
to sensation seeking, predicted risky choices on the affectively laden, experiential
version of the CCT, but not on the more deliberative, non-feedback version of the
task. In keeping with the view that sensation seeking tendencies are more related to
risk taking on behavioral risk tasks that provide immediate feedback and trigger
emotional arousal, de Haan et al. (2011) found that the risk taking subscale of the
RT-18, which included items ostensibly related to sensation seeking, was more
strongly associated with risk taking on the Cambridge Gambling Task (CGT, Rogers
et al., 1999), an experienced-based risk taking task, than was the risk assessment
subscale of the RT-18 (de Haan et al., 2011), which included more items ostensibly
related to impulsiveness (vs. deliberation).
Sensation Seeking from a Temperament Perspective
Although these findings suggest that sensation seeking is broadly related to risk tak-
ing across a number of domains, only considering sensation seeking total scores
may obfuscate specific contributions of unique facets specifically related to tem-
perament. In this regard, Glicksohn and Abulafia (1998) reconsidered sensation
seeking as a trait that spans across the Eysenckian temperament dimensions of

extraversion and psychoticism and, hence, proposed two major components. First,
the non-impulsive, socialized mode of sensation seeking is most likely involved in
seeking stimulating situations characterized by minimal or no risk; when risk is
present, premeditation, intense training, or careful planning may be required (e.g.,
travel to exotic or unusual new places, perform in front of a big audience, sky or
cycle downhill at high speed; see also Hansen & Breivik, 2001). For example, a
mountaineer or a scuba diver might deliberately take risk facing variable conditions
or hostile environments and yet adopt precautions to control the risk, such as check-
ing weather forecasts or up-keeping air cylinders and equipments (Woodman,
Barlow, Bandura, Hill, Kupciw, & MacGregor, 2013). Furthermore, sensation seek-
ing is only one of the motives that drive people to engage in high-risk sport activi-
ties, and not all risky sports are equally appealing for sensation seekers (e.g.,
skydiving vs. mountaineering; Barlow, Woodman, & Hardy, 2013). In terms of
SSS-V subscales, thrill and adventure seeking may be more strongly aligned with
this component. In contrast, a second dimension, the impulsive, unsocialized mode,
is most likely involved in engaging in stimulating experiences for which the risk of
personal and social harm is high (e.g., gambling, bullying others, attending “wild”
parties). Disinhibition and boredom susceptibility subscales may be especially
strong markers of this component. Accordingly, Glicksohn and Abulafia (1998) sug-
gest that the former component is more strongly associated with extraversion,
whereas the latter component is more strongly tied to psychoticism, a construct
similar to disinhibition in a Big Three temperament framework.
As anticipated, de Haan et al. (2011) developed a brief risk taking measure that
included items tapping into sensation seeking tendencies from different personality
inventories. The analysis yielded a first factor, labeled risk taking, characterized
largely by items describing enjoyment or involvement in a variety of stimulating
risky situations; whereas a second factor labeled risk assessment included items
reflecting the tendency to deliberate over choices compared to acting impulsively.
Furthermore, the two factors were moderately intercorrelated, and the group of
people scoring higher on the risk taking subscale and lower on the risk assessment
ones included more risk takers, such as recreational drug users, that not only sought
for stimulating experiences but also, but less so, were less likely to approach deci-
sions in a reasoned, deliberative manner. Likewise, Woodman et al. (2013) devel-
oped a Risk Taking Inventory for high-risk sport participants.
Given these insights, we can reconsider Zuckerman and Kuhlman’s (2000) find-
ings that overall sensation seeking did not correlate with risky driving and gam-
bling. In fact, if only some facets of a multifaceted trait can predict a specific target
variable, using the total trait score for prediction can be misleading because non-
predictive facets might dilute the predictive relationship of other facets more closely
tied to the target variable of interest. In keeping with this view, research has sug-
gested that separate SSS domains may more or less strongly be associated with
specific types of risk behavior, which may attenuate total score correlations with the
criterion. For instance, Jonah (2001) found that the thrill and adventure seeking
subscale showed stronger correlations with risky driving than did the other sub-
scales. Conversely, Fortune and Goodie (2010) found mean-level differences
between pathological and non-pathological gamblers for the disinhibition and bore-
dom susceptibility subscales, but not the experience seeking or thrill and adventure
seeking subscales.
More broadly, we can consider these results within a temperament perspective.
Specifically, thrill and adventure seeking involves seeking and positively appraising
arousing and stimulating events, which may be more strongly associated with posi-
tive emotionality. By contrast, disinhibition and boredom susceptibility, relate to the
impulsive, unsocialized mode, may be more strongly aligned with disinhibition (vs.
constraint). As we will explain in a later section, this distinction may have important
implications for understanding the personality antecedents of domain-specific risks.
Impulsivity and Risk Taking
Like sensation seeking, impulsivity is a trait that has been extensively associated
with real-world risk taking (e.g., Chambers & Potenza, 2003; Dahlen et al., 2005;
De Wit, 2009; Hoyle et al., 2000). Real-world risky behaviors often involve a choice
between an immediate reward associated with a bad habit (e.g., taking drugs, gam-
bling, or smoking) and a delayed greater reward that might be obtained by ending
that habit (cf., Chapman, 2005; Critchfield & Kollins, 2001). Therefore, it has been
hypothesized that impulsive individuals are inclined to engage in maladaptive risky
behaviors to the extent that they value the immediate positive consequences of their
actions (e.g., the exhilaration of gambling) to be larger than delayed advantages
deriving from abstaining from those actions.
Impulsivity is a construct that has been conceptualized in a multitude of ways,
including present time orientation, inability to delay gratification, reward sensitiv-
ity, impaired cognitive control, quick decision making, lack of premeditation and
planning, and even behavioral disinhibition, sensation seeking, and risk taking (Bari
& Robbins, 2013; Enticott & Ogloff, 2006). For purposes of the current chapter, we
follow a recent definition offered by Moeller, Barratt, Dougherty, Schmitz, and
Swann (2001), who argue that a description of impulsivity needs to incorporate an
individual’s tendency to demonstrate decreased sensitivity to less favorable behav-
ioral consequences both in the short- and long-term and fast responses based on
incomplete information processing. Moeller et al. (2001) also note that, based on
these definitional components, impulsivity involves risks but suggest that impulsive
risk taking may be distinguished from sensation seeking risks.
The impulsivity literature is voluminous, and a full review of methodologies
span beyond the scope of the chapter. However, we describe several methods by
which impulsivity is measured, both from self-report and behavioral perspectives,
to highlight personality processes linking impulsivity with risk taking.
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Gordon saw both pictures clearly as he paused, his foot on the
carriage step. Then he spoke to the coachman.
“To Lady Jersey’s,” he said, and reëntered the carriage.
CHAPTER XI
THE BEATEN PATH
The late sun, rosying the lake beside the ruined cloister, had drawn
its flame-wrought curtains across the moor that lay about Newstead,
and the library was full of shadows as Gordon groped in the
darkness for a candle.
Dinner was scarce through, for the party he had gathered—who for a
noisy fortnight had made the gray old pile resound to the richest
fooleries in the range of their invention—did not rise before noon,
had scarce breakfasted by two, and voted the evening still in its
prime at three o’clock in the morning. The Abbey had been theirs to
turn upside down and they had given rein to every erratic audacity.
That very day they had had the servants drag into the dining-room
an old stone coffin from the rubbish of the tumble-down priory; had
resurrected from some cobwebbed corner a set of monkish dresses
with all the proper apparatus of crosses and beads with which they
had opened a conventual chapter of “The Merry Monks of
Newstead”; and had set Fletcher to polishing the old skull drinking-
cup on whose silver mounting Gordon long ago had had engraved
the stanzas he had written on the night his mother lay dead. The
grotesquerie had been hailed with enthusiasm, and the company
had sat that evening gowned and girdled about the dinner-table,
where Sheridan’s gray poll had given him the seat of honor as abbot.
Gordon wore one of the black gabardines, as he lit the candle in the
utterly confused library. It was a sullen, magnificent chamber. The
oak wainscoting was black with age. Tapestries and book-shelves
covered one side, and floor and tables were littered with reviews and
books, carelessly flung from their place.
A shout, mingled with the prolonged howls of a wolf and the angered
“woof” of a bear sounded from the driveway—the guests were
amusing themselves with the beasts chained on either side of the
entrance. These were relics of that old, resentful season when
Gordon had hermited himself there to lash his critics with his defiant
Satire. The wolf, he had then vowed, should be entered for the
deanery of St. Paul’s, and the bear sit for a theological fellowship at
Cambridge.
For a moment, candle in hand, he listened to the mingled noises, his
head on one side, a posture almost of irksomeness. He started when
Sheridan’s hand fell on his shoulder.
“By the Lord!” he ejaculated. “I took you for the Abbey ghost!”
Sheridan laughed, lit the cigar Gordon handed him, and sat down,
tucking the ends of his rope-girdle between his great knees. The
tonsure he had contrived was a world too small for his massive
head, and the monk’s robe showed inconsistent glimpses of red
waistcoat and fawn-colored trousers where its edges gaped.
“What are you mooning over?” he asked. “Got a new poem in mind?”
“No. To-day I have thrown two into the fire to my comfort, and
smoked out of my head the plan of another.”
“Sentimental?”
“Not I. I was thinking of the East. I wish I might sail for Greece in the
spring—provided I neither marry myself nor unmarry any one else in
the interval.”
“Why not the first?” the other pursued. “I tried it younger than you.”
The speaker sighed presently, and locking his hands behind his
head, leaned back against the cushions, his fine, rugged face under
its shock of rough gray hair, turned tender. “My pretty maid of Bath!”
he said softly. “Elizabeth, my girl-wife that I fought a duel for at
Kingsdown and who ran away with me to France when I hadn’t a
pound! It’s twelve years since she died. This is an anniversary to me,
my boy. Forty years ago to-day she married me. I hadn’t written ‘The
Rivals’ then, nor gone to Parliament—nor grown old!”
Gordon was silent. Sheridan’s face, in the candle-light, was older
than he had ever seen it. Age was claiming him, though youth was
still in the foppish dress, the brilliant sparkle of the eye, the sharp
quickness on the tongue. But the wife he remembered at that
moment had belonged to a past generation.
A muffled call came—“Sherry! Sherry!” and at the summons the gray
head lifted and the gleam of incorrigible humor shot again across the
thin cheeks. “The rogues are whooping for me!” he chuckled, and
hurried out.
Gordon stared into the gloom of the open window opposite in a
reverie. That echo of still-living memory struck across his whimsical
mood with strange directness, like a voice speaking insistently of
simple human needs.
“To love, to marry—” he reflected. “It is the recourse of the highest
intellect as well as the lowest. There is Sheridan. He is brain at its
summit. He puts more intellect into squeezing a new case of claret
out of a creditor tradesman than the average man has in his whole
brain-box. He has written the very best drama and delivered the very
best single oration ever conceived or heard in England. And now,
without his pretty wife, he is a prey to debt, to gaining and to the
bailiffs! Peace and single possession, the Eden-right of man—the
having and holding from all the world of one warm, human sympathy
—that is the world’s way, the clear result of ages of combined
experience.”
He looked up at a pounding of hoofs outside and a howl from the
chained wolf. The sounds merged into a hilarious hubbub from the
dining-room, betokening some neighborhood arrival.
His eyes, still gazing through the parted curtains, could discern dimly
on the terrace a white image standing out in relief from the swathing
darkness. It was a statue of Vesta, goddess of the domestic fireside.
It seemed to gaze in at him with a peculiar quiet significance. To the
Romans that image had stood for the hearthstone—for all the sweet,
age-old conventionalities of life, such as enshrined his sister, in her
placid country home, her children around her. He had a vision of a
stately figure moving about the Abbey with a watching solicitude, and
there flashed into his mind the beginning of one of his poems:
“She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies—”
It sang itself over in his brain. The woman he would choose would be
like that—cool, cloudless, beautiful as the night outside the open
window. He knew such a woman, as flawless and as lovely—one,
and one only. His thought, unweighted by purpose, had followed her
since that July afternoon when she had handed him the golden
guinea in exchange for his book. She was not in London now. At that
moment she was in Mansfield, a sharp gallop across the Newstead
moor. If he had ever had a dream of feminine perfectness, she was
its embodiment. Would marriage with such a one fetter him? In the
great clanging world that teased and worried him, would it not be a
refuge?
A sudden recollection came to him, out of the dust of a past year—a
recollection of a youth with bright eyes and tangled hair, in the Fleet
Prison. There had been an hour, before success had bitten him,
when he had promised himself that fame’s fox-fire should not lure
him, that he would cherish his song and rid his soul of the petty
things that dragged it down. How had that promise been fulfilled?
With poor adventure, and empty intrigue and flickering rushlight
amours to which that restless something in him had driven him on,
an anchorless craft in the cross-tides of passion!
“Home!” he mused. “To pursue no will-o’-the-wisp of fancy! To shut
out all vagrant winds and prolong that spark of celestial fire!”
He drew a quick sibilant breath, sat down, at the writing-table and
wrote hastily but unerringly, a letter, clean-etched and
unembellished, a simple statement and a question.
He signed it, laughing aloud as a sense of wild incongruity gushed
over him. Through the heavy oaken doors he could hear mingled
laughter and uproar. A stentorian bass was rumbling a drinking-song.
What a challenging antithesis! Lava and snow—erratic comet and
chaste moon—jungle passions and the calm of a northern
landscape! A proposal of marriage written at such a time and place,
with a drinking-stave shouted in the next room! And what would be
her answer?
The daring grew brighter in his eye. He sealed the letter with a coin
from his waistcoat pocket, sprang up and jerked the bell-rope. The
footman entered.
“Rushton, have Selim saddled at once and take this note to
Mansfield. Ride like the devil. Do you hear?”
“Yes, my lord.” The boy looked at the superscription, put the note in
his pocket and was gone.
Gordon laughed again—a burst of gusty excitement—and seized the
full ink-well into which he had dipped his pen. “It shall serve no
lesser purpose!” he exclaimed, and hurled it straight through the
open window.
Then he threw open the door and walked hastily toward the hilarity of
the great dining-room.
CHAPTER XII
“MAN’S LOVE IS OF MAN’S LIFE A THING
APART”
What he saw as he emerged from the hall was Saturnalia indeed.

Sheridan, his robe thrown open from his capacious frame, sat with
knees wide apart, his chair tilted back, his face crumpling with
amusement. Hobhouse sat cross-legged on the stone coffin. Others,
robed and tonsured, were grouped about the board, and on it was
perched a stooped and ungainly figure in a somber dress of semi-
clerical severity.
“Sunburn me, it’s Dr. Cassidy,” muttered Gordon, with a grim smile.
“And without his tracts! What’s he doing at Newstead? The rascals—
they’ve got him fuddled!”
The hospitality offered in the host’s absence had in truth proved too
much for the doctor. Now, as he balanced on his gaitered feet among
the overturned wine-bottles, he looked a very unclerical figure
indeed. His neck-cloth was awry, and his flattish eyes had a look of
comical earnestness and unaccustomed good-fellowship. He held a
wine-glass and waved it in uncertain gestures, his discourse
punctured by frequent and unstinted applause:
“What was the Tree of Knowledge doing in the garden, you ask. Why
not planted on the other side of the wall? Human reason,
enlightened by inspiration, finds no answer in the divine Word.
Theology is our only refuge. Adam was predestined to sin. All
created things are contingent on omnipotent volition. Sin being
predestined, the process leading to that sin must be predestined,
too. See? Sin—Adam. Garden—snake. The law of the divine Will
accomplished.”
Hobhouse wiped his eyes with his handkerchief. “Who could
contemplate the picture,” he groaned, “without tears? Poor fallen
man! I weep for him.”
The remark struck the lecturer with pathos. The look of stern
satisfaction with which he had so eloquently justified the eternal
tragedy melted into a compassionate expression which had a soft
tinge of the romantic. He smiled—a smile of mingled burgundy and
benevolence.
“Herein, gentlemen, appears our lesson of infinite pity. Man expelled
from Eden, but still possessing Eve. Justice tempered with mercy.
Love of woman compensating for the loss of earthly Paradise.”
“True, true,” murmured Hobhouse. “‘There’s heaven on earth in
woman’s love,’ as Mr. Moore, here, sings. A prime subject for
another toast, Doctor. We’ve drunk to the navy and to theology; now
for a glass to her eternal ladyship!—Egad! Here’s Gordon!”
The final word brought a shout, and the glasses were refilled.
“Gordon’s toast!” they insisted as they opened ranks. “A toast, or a
new poem!”
Some disturbance out of doors had roused the animals kennelled at
the hall entrance and a battery of growls mingled with the
importunities.
Sheridan pounded with his great fist on the jingling board till the
uproar stilled. “The lord of the manor speaks!” he proclaimed.
Gordon approached the table and picked up the skull-cup. In the
blaze of candle-light, his face showed markedly its singular and
magnetic beauty. He glanced about him an instant—at Sheridan’s
waggish, rough-hewn countenance, at the circle of younger flushed
and uproarious ones, and at the labored solemnity and surprise of
the central figure on the table. The doctor’s answering stare was full
of a fresh bewilderment; he was struggling to recall a message he
had brought to some one—he had forgotten to whom—which in the
last half-hour had slipped like oil from his mind.
In Gordon’s brain verses yet unwritten had been grouping
themselves that afternoon—verses that not for long were to be set in
type—and he spoke them now; not flippantly, but with a note of
earnestness and of feeling, a light flush in his cheek tingeing the
colorless white of his face, and his gray-blue eyes darkened to violet.
“Woman! though framed in weakness, ever yet
Her heart reigns mistress of man’s varied mind.
And she will follow where that heart is set
As roll the waves before the settled wind.
Her soul is feminine nor can forget—
To all except love’s image, fondly blind.
And she can e’en survive love’s fading dim,
And bear with life, to love and pray for him!”
It was an odd thing to see this compelling figure, standing in the
midst of these monkish roisterers, all in celibate robes and beads,
declaiming lines of such passionate beauty and in a voice flexible
and appealing. An odd toast to drink from such a goblet!
“Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
’Tis woman’s whole existence; man may range
The court, camp, church, the vessel and the mart,
Sword, gown, gain, glory offer in exchange.
Pride and ambition may o’errun his heart,
And few there are whom these cannot estrange.
Woman knows but one refuge, if love err—
To draw him from these baubles, back to her!”
There was an instant of dead silence when he paused, broken by the
doctor’s hiccough and a voice behind them.
Sheridan saw Gordon set down the skull-cup as the spot of color
faded from his cheek. He turned to the entrance.
“Curse catch me!” gasped the wit, springing to his feet. “Lady
Melbourne and Miss Milbanke!”
CHAPTER XIII
THE SMIRCHED IMAGE
All turned astonished faces. Just inside the oaken door swung wide
open to the night, stood her ladyship, her features expressing a
sense of humor struggling with dignity, and just behind her, with a
look of blent puzzle and surprise, her stately niece, Annabel
Milbanke. Mrs. Muhl, Gordon’s withered fire-lighter, was hovering in
the rear.
It was a tense moment. Gordon’s glance swept Annabel’s face—
distinguished a letter still unopened in her hand—as he came
forward to greet them. A dull red was climbing over Cassidy’s
sobering face, and with something between a gulp and a groan he
got down heavily from his commanding position.
It was Lady Melbourne who broke the pause:
“I fear we intrude. We were driving across to Annesley where there is
a ball to-night, and felt tempted to take your lordship with us. We had
not known of your guests. Dr. Cassidy rode ahead to apprise you of
our call.”
The doctor was mopping his mottled brow. He was far too miserable
to reply.
“I fear our hospitality outran our discretion,” ventured Gordon. “The
doctor perhaps forgot to mention it.”
Lady Melbourne’s quick gaze overran the scene and lingered on the
crosses and the monkish robes with a slow-dawning smile.
Sheridan made a dramatic gesture. “Lo, the first poet of his age in
the depths of one of his abandoned debauches!” He pointed to Mrs.
Muhl who stood in the background, her wrinkled countenance as
brown as a dry toast—“Behold the troop of Paphian damsels, as
pictured in the Morning Post! Evasion is no longer possible.”
“I see. And you, Doctor?”
“The doctor,” said Moore, maintaining his gravity, “had just read us
his latest tract.”
“I regret we missed it.” She turned to Gordon. “We will not linger.
Good night, gentlemen. No,”—as Gordon protested—“our carriage
and escort are waiting.”
“My dear Lady Melbourne,” interposed Sheridan, “the entire chapter
shall escort you. As abbot, I claim my right,”—and he offered her his
arm. Gordon followed with her niece.
Annabel’s hand fluttered on his sleeve. “We heard your toast,” she
said. “I did not dream it of you.”
On the threshold a tide of rich light met them. The moon had risen
and was lifting above the moor beyond a belt of distant beechwood,
bathing the golden flanks of the hills, flooding the long lake with soft
yellow luster and turning the gray ruins of the priory to dull silver.
Lady Melbourne led the way out on to the mole of the drained moat
with a cry of delight: “What a perfect lilac night! It is like Venice. All it
lacks is a gondola and music.”
Gordon and Annabel had lingered at the turn of the parapet. He put
out his hand and touched the letter she held with his forefinger. “You
have not opened it.”
“No. Your footman met us coming in the lodge gate.”
“Read it.”
She looked at him a moment hesitatingly. For a long time she had
not been ignorant of her interest in George Gordon. She admired
him also, as every woman admires talent and achievement, and the
excess of worship which the world gave him fed her pride in the
special measure of his regard. She saw something new in his look
to-night—something more genuine, yet illusive.
“Read it,” he repeated.
She broke the seal and held the written page to the moonlight. As
she read, a soft mellow note arose. It was Hobhouse’s violoncello,
playing an aria of Rossini’s—a haunting melody that matched the
night. The notes were still throbbing when her eyes lifted.
Gordon had taken a golden guinea from his pocket; he leaned
forward and laid it on the letter’s waxen seal. It fitted the impression.
“It was a gift,” he said. “It is the one you gave me that day at the
book-shop.”
She felt a sudden tremor of heart—or of nerves.
“Oh,” she exclaimed, thrilled for a brief moment; “and you kept it?”
At that instant a figure approached them across the terrace, doffing
his cap awkwardly. It was the under-gardener, bringing a trinket he
had found that afternoon among the lily-bulbs.
Gordon looked at the plain gold circlet he handed him. He turned to
Annabel with a strange expression as the man disappeared.
“It is my mother’s wedding-ring,” he said in a low voice. “It was lost
when I was a child.”
“How very odd,” she commented, “to find it—to-day!”
The music had ceased, and Lady Melbourne and her tonsured
attendants were coming toward them.
Annabel’s hand rested on the stone railing and Gordon took it,
looking full into her eyes.
“Shall I put it on?” he asked.
She looked from the ring to his face—her cool fingers trembling in
his.
“Yes,” she answered, and he slipped it on her finger.
The noise of the departing carriage-wheels had scarce died away

when Sheridan entered the library, whither Gordon had preceded
him. He was tittering inordinately.
“I’ve been trying to find Cassidy,” he said, “but he’s gone. Went and
got his horse while Hobhouse was fiddling. Poor doctor! If he’d only
been a parson!”
“Look, look!” cried Gordon. He was pointing to the window.
Sheridan stared. The unwavering moonlight fell on the image of
Vesta—no longer marble-white. The ink-well Gordon had hurled
through the window had struck full on its brows, and the clear
features and raiment were blackened and befouled with a sinister
stain!
CHAPTER XIV
WHAT CAME OF THE TREACLE-MOON
“The treacle-moon is over. I am awake and find myself married.”

Gordon read the lines in the diary he held, by the fading daylight. He
sat in the primrosed garden of his town house on Piccadilly Terrace,
beside a wicker tea-table. The day was at its amber hour. The
curtains of the open windows behind him waved lazily in the breeze
and the fragrance of hawthorn clung like a caress across the twilight.
What he read had been the last entry in the book.
He smiled grimly, remembering the night he had written it. It was at
Seaham, the home of his wife’s girlhood, the final day of their stay—
the end of that savorless month of sameness and stagnation, of
eating fruit and sauntering, playing dull games at cards, yawning,
reading old Annual Registers and the daily papers, listening to the
monologue that his elderly father-in-law called conversation, and
watching the growth of stunted gooseberry bushes—the month in
which he had eaten of the bitter fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. To-
day he recalled the trenchant features of that visit distinctly: the prim,
austere figure of Lady Noël, his wife’s mother, presiding at the table;
Sir Ralph opposite, mumbling for the third time, over a little huddle of
decanters which could neither interrupt nor fall asleep, the speech he
had made at a recent tax-meeting; his own wife with eyes that so
seldom warmed to his, but grew keener each day to glance cold
disapproval; and Mrs. Clermont, Lady Noël’s companion and
confidante, black-gowned, bloodless, with noiseless gliding step and
observant gaze—Jane Clermont’s aunt, as he had incidentally
learned.
“The treacle-moon is over!” And that satiric comment had been
penned almost a year ago!
Gordon moved his shoulders with a quick gesture, as though
dismissing an unpleasant reflection, and took from his pocket a little
black phial. He measured out a minute quantity of the dark liquid into
a glass and poured it full of water. He drank the dull, cloudy mixture
at a draft.
“How strange that mind should need this!” he said to himself. “My
brain is full of images—rare, beautiful, dreamlike—but they are
meaningless, incoherent, unattached. A few drops of this elixir and
they coalesce, crystallize, transform themselves—and I have a
poem. I have only to write it down. I wrote ‘Lara’ in three evenings,
while I was undressing from the opera. It shan’t master me as it has
De Quincey, either. Why, all my life I have denied myself even meat.
My soul shall not be the slave of any appetite!”
He smiled whimsically as he set down the glass: “What nonsense it
is to talk of soul,” he muttered, “when a cloud makes it melancholy,
and wine makes it mad!”
He paused, listening intently. A low sound, an infant’s cry, had
caught his ear. His eyes grew darker violet. His look changed.
“Ada! Ada!” he said in a whisper.
In his voice was a singular vibrant accent—intense, eager, yet the
words had the quality of a sacrament and a consecration.
He rose, thrust the diary into his pocket and went into the house,
ascending the stair to a small room at the end of the hall. The door
was ajar and a dim light showed within. He listened, then pushed the
door wider and entered. A white nursery bed stood in one corner,
and Gordon noiselessly placed a chair beside it and sat down, his
elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand, looking at the little face
against the pillow, the tiny fist lying on the coverlid.
Gazing, his deeply carved lips moulded softly, a sense of the
overwhelming miracle of life possessed him. This small fabric was
woven of his own flesh. He saw his own curving mouth, his full chin,
his brow! Some day those hands would cling to his, those lips would
frame the word “father.” What of life’s pitfalls, of its tragedies,
awaited this new being he had brought into the world?
He sighed, and as if in answer, the baby sighed too. The sound
smote him strangely. Was there some occult sympathy between
them? Her birthright was not only of flesh, but of spirit. Had she also
share in his isolated heart, his wayward impulses, his passionate
pride?
“ADA! MY ONE SWEET DAUGHTER!” p. 103.

At length he took out the diary and opening it on his knee, began to
write—lines whose feeling swelled from some great wave of
tenderness:
“Ada! my one sweet daughter! If a name

Dearer and purer were, it should be thine.
Whate’er of earth divide us I shall claim
Not tears, but tenderness to answer mine:
Go where I will, to me thou art the same—
A loved regret which I would not resign.
There are but two things in my destiny,—
A world to roam through, and a home with thee.
I can reduce all feelings but this one;

And that I would not;—for at length I see
Such scenes as those wherein my life begun.
The earliest—even the only paths for me—
Had I but sooner learned the crown to shun,
I had been better than I now can be;
The passions which have torn me would have died;
I had not suffered, and thou hadst not sighed.
I feel almost at times as I have felt

In happy childhood; trees, and flowers and brooks
Which do remember me of where I dwelt
Ere my young mind was sacrificed to books,
Come as of yore upon me, and can melt
My heart with recognition of their looks;
Till even at moments I have thought to see
Some living thing to love—but none like thee.
With false ambition what had I to do?

Little with love, and least of all with fame.
And yet they came unsought, and with me grew,
And made me all! which they can make—a name.
Yet this was not the end I did pursue;
Surely I once beheld a nobler aim.
Yet If thou help me find it—even so
Shall I be glad that I have purchased woe!”
The door of the room adjoining opened and a figure dressed in white
appeared. He rose and passed through.
“You wished me, Annabel?”
“I do not wish Ada disturbed. As you know, I am starting with her to
Seaham to-morrow, and she needs the rest.”
“I was very quiet,” he said almost apologetically, and a little wearily.
Her critical eye had wandered to the book and pencil in his hand.
The look was cold—glacially so—and disapproving, as she asked
with quiet point:
“My lord, when do you intend to give up your tiresome habit of
versifying?”
He stared at her. In all her lack of understanding, she had at least
spared him this. Yet this was really what she thought! At heart she
despised him for the only thing that to him made life endurable. She
took no pride in his poetry, wished him a man like others of her circle
—a dull, church-going, speech-reading, tea-drinking, partridge-
hunting clod! A flush blurred his vision.
“Surely,” a thin edge of contempt cutting in her words, “you do not
intend always to do only this? You are a peer, you have a seat in the
Lords. You might be anything you choose.”
“But if I am—what I choose?” he said difficultly.
A chill anger lay behind her constrained manner. Her lips were
pressed tight together. During the whole time of their marriage he
had never seen her display more feeling than in that brief moment on
the terrace at Newstead when he had put his mother’s ring upon her
finger. For a long time he had watched for some sign—each day
feeling his heart, so savage of vitality, contract and harden under that
colorless restraint—till he had come to realize that the untroubled
gentleness was only passivity, the calm strength but complacency as
cold as the golden guinea he had treasured, that the flower he had
chosen for its white fragrance was a sculptured altar-lily. Now her
mind seemed jolted from its conventional groove. The fact was that
the constant flings of his enemies, which he noted with sovereign
contempt, had pierced her deeply, wounding that love of the world’s
opinion so big in her. And a venomous review which her mother had
brought her that day had mingled its abuse with a strain of pity for
her, and pity she could not bear.
“Why do you not choose to live like other men?” she broke out.
“There is something so selfish, so unnatural in your engrossed
silences, your changeable moods, your disregard of ordinary
customs. You believe nothing that other men believe.”
His face had grown weirdly white. The sudden outburst had startled
him. He was struggling with resentment.
“Cassidy’s doctrinal tracts, for instance?” The query had a tinge of
sarcasm.
She bit her lips. “You have no idea of reverence for anything. I might
have guessed it that night at Newstead and how you treated him!
You speak your views on religion—views that I hate—openly,
anywhere. You write and print them, too, in your verse!”
“You are frank,” he said; “let me be the same. What my brain
conceives my hand shall write. If I valued fame, I should flatter
received opinions. That I have never done! I cannot and will not give
the lie to my doubts, come what may.”
“What right have you to have those doubts?” Her anger was rising
full-fledged, and bitter-winged with malice. “Why do you set yourself
against all that is best? What do you believe in that is good, I should
like to know?”
“I abhor books of religion,” he responded steadily, “and the
blasphemous notions of sectaries. I have no belief in their absurd
heresies and Thirty-nine Articles. I feel joy in all beautiful and
sublime things. But I hate convention and cant and lay-figure virtue,
and shall go on hating them to the end of the chapter.”
“To the end of the chapter!” she echoed. “You mean to do nothing
more—to think of nothing but scribbling pretty lines on paper and
making a mystery of yourself! What is our life to be together? What
did you marry me for?”
“Bella!” The word was almost a cry. “I married you for faith, not for
creeds! I am as I have always been—I have concealed nothing. I
married you for sympathy and understanding! I know I am not like
other men—but I tried to make you love and understand me!—I tried!
Why did you marry me?”
For an instant the real pain in the appeal seemed to cleave through
her icy demeanor and she made an involuntary movement. But as
she hesitated, Fletcher knocked at the door:
“Mr. Sheridan, my lord, come to take you to Drury Lane.”
The words congealed the softer feeling. As the valet withdrew, she
turned upon her husband.
“Sheridan! and Drury Lane! That is the kind of company you prefer to
keep! A doddering old man who falls asleep over his negus in
White’s bow-window, coming and going here at all hours, and
littering the library with his palsied snuff-taking.”
A doddering old man! It was true. The soul of White’s and Brookes’,
the first table wit and vivant of the kingdom, the companion of a royal
prince—he, “Sherry,” who all his life had never known ache or pain,
not even the gout, who had out-dandied and out-bumpered the
youngest of them—had lived beyond his time. The welcome of the
gay world had dwindled to a grudging patronage. Gordon had more
than once of late come between him and a low sponging-house or
the debtors’ prison. Yet at his wife’s tone, a gleam of anger shot into
his eyes—anger that made them steely-blue as sword blades.
“Sheridan was my friend,” he said. “My friend from the first, when
others snarled. He is old now—old and failing—but he is still my
friend. Is a man to pay no regard to loyalty or friendship?”
“He should have regard first to his own reputation. Do you? Even
Brummell and Petersham and your choice fops of the Cocoa-Tree
tavern and the Drury Lane committee have some thought for the
world’s opinion. But you have none. You care nothing for what it
thinks of you or of your morality.”
“Morality!” he repeated slowly. “I never heard the word before from
anybody who was not a rascal that used it for a purpose!”
“Why will you sit silent,” she continued, “and hear yourself defamed
everywhere without a word? Why will you not defend yourself?”
He shrugged his shoulders, the flash of indignation past She had
touched the point of least response. The shrug angered her even

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Full download test bank at ebook textbookfull.

Psychological Perspectives on Risk

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International Perspectives on Cyberbullying:

Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Risk Management and

Risk and Reliability Analysis Theory and Applications

Understanding Modern Dive Computers and Operation

Derivatives and Internal Models: Modern Risk Management

Mind Body and Morality New Perspectives on Descartes

Risk Return Analysis The Theory and Practice of

Game Theory for Security and Risk Management From

Foreword by Paul Slovic

Bernhard Streicher FOM University of Applied Sciences

ISBN 978-3-319-92476-2 ISBN 978-3-319-92478-6 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951412

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018

Decision Research and University of Oregon Paul Slovic

do I make investment decisions without knowledge of future developments on the

Cambridge, MA, USA Martina Raue

Part I Individual Differences in Risk Perception

Part II Cognitive, Emotional and Social Perspectives on Risk

Part III Modeling Decision Making under Risk

8 Behavioral Models of Decision Making Under Risk���������������������������� 181

Part IV Communicating Risks to the Public

Part V Practical Implications for Industry, Policy and Research

Michael H. Birnbaum Decision Research Center, California State University,

Rocio Garcia-Retamero Department of Experimental Psychology, University of

Mary Kate Tompkins Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University,

Martina Raue is a Research Scientist at the MIT AgeLab in Cambridge,

Eva Lermer is a Professor of Business Psychology at the FOM University of

Bernhard Streicher is a Full Professor of Social and Personality Psychology and

Marco Lauriola and Joshua Weller

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 3

(disinhibition), are affect-relevant traits. Because of this theoretical link, tempera-

 efinitions of Risk and Construct Validity of Risk-Related

Choice-Based Experimental Tasks

Hypothetical gambles still are common in behavioral economics, based on the

Self-Report Behavior Approaches

In contrast to a financial-based definition of risk taking based on variance, self-­

Self-Report Trait-Based Approaches

Personality researchers interested in better understanding individual differences in

Personality and Risk Taking

Because economists and psychologists from different subdisciplines have defined

robiological mechanisms that are responsible for an individual’s experience of

Sensation Seeking and Risk Taking

Sensation Seeking from a Temperament Perspective

seeking as a trait that spans across the Eysenckian temperament dimensions of

Impulsivity and Risk Taking

What he saw as he emerged from the hall was Saturnalia indeed.

The noise of the departing carriage-wheels had scarce died away

“The treacle-moon is over. I am awake and find myself married.”

“ADA! MY ONE SWEET DAUGHTER!” p. 103.

“Ada! my one sweet daughter! If a name

I can reduce all feelings but this one;

I feel almost at times as I have felt

With false ambition what had I to do?

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Decision Research and University of Oregon Paul Slovic

Cambridge, MA, USA Martina Raue

Part I Individual Differences in Risk Perception

Part II Cognitive, Emotional and Social Perspectives on Risk

Part III Modeling Decision Making under Risk

8 Behavioral Models of Decision Making Under Risk�� 181

Part IV Communicating Risks to the Public

Part V Practical Implications for Industry, Policy and Research

efinitions of Risk and Construct Validity of Risk-Related

Choice-Based Experimental Tasks

Self-Report Behavior Approaches

In contrast to a financial-based definition of risk taking based on variance, self-

Self-Report Trait-Based Approaches

Personality and Risk Taking

Sensation Seeking and Risk Taking

Sensation Seeking from a Temperament Perspective

Impulsivity and Risk Taking