Correlates of recreational risk-taking behavior: A comparison between the Tower Building Task and two self-report measures

Abstract

Risk-taking is a ubiquitous behavior and its assessment is a central aspect of understanding human decision-making. Self-report questionnaires can be used to probe risk-taking propensities in a domain-specific manner. In contrast, most behavioral tools for risk-taking assessment provide nonspecific, unitary measures with a strong bias towards risk scenarios involving monetary gains and losses tied to probabilities. In the current work, we evaluate a behavioral task designed to specifically address recreational risk-taking, that is, situations where decision-making is driven by intrinsic motivation and performance is rewarding in its own right. For this, we chose the Tower Building Task (TBT), in which participants use wooden blocks to attempt to build the tallest tower they can; a trial ends if the building collapses, the allotted time ends, or the builder is satisfied with their tower. We correlated the TBT scores with each of the domains provided by two widely used self-report instruments, the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking scale (DOSPERT) and the Evolutionary Domain-Specific Risk scale (ERS). We found small, but significant correlations between TBT scores and those of (i) the recreational domain of the DOSPERT as well as (ii) the environmental exploration domain of the ERS. These correlation values reflect a small degree of similarity between these tests, suggesting that they capture some aspects of the complex construct that is recreation. However, the small magnitude of the correlations highlights the need for a complementary set of tools to evaluate the full spectrum of recreational risk-taking activities.