Taking Risks

Don't be fooled into thinking that only daredevils and madmen take risks. Several times a day most of us make decisions that dictate whether we live or die, and most of the time we are not even aware of it.

For example, where and when you choose to cross the road has a huge impact on your future well-being, as does the way you might carry out DIY, change a light bulb, walk down stairs or get out of the bath. You only have to watch a toddler exploring their surroundings to realise just how dangerous the world can be. In fact even getting dressed can be fraught with dangers. According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents 'trouser-related accidents' account for several thousand accidents in Britain each year, while only a couple of thousand are typically caused by high heels.

Our perception of risk is fascinating from a psychological point of view, not least because of the huge amount of subjective variation involved. Why are people willing to campaign against mobile phone base stations whilst smoking 20 a day? And why is it that we are able to almost unquestioningly entrust our lives in traffic lights, confident that the oncoming cars will stop as we pass, and yet be so unwilling to trust a politician or estate agent just because of the colour of their tie or the condition of their teeth?

There are many theories that attempt to explain this kind of behaviour, so many in fact that psychology has an entire field devoted to it. Some of the earliest research quickly revealed a startling fact, that all too often we don't properly assess situations when it comes to risk; instead we use rules of thumb, or heuristics. These are effectively guesses based on what we think we know and from past experience. Interestingly, this is quite effective and allows us to assess and respond to situations quickly.

However, this is by no means the end of the story. To make matters a bit more complicated it turns out that these assessments although often accurate are extremely subjective, depending heavily upon the perspective of the observer, and in particular how much they believe they are in control of the situation. This goes some way to explain why it is that some people are comfortable taking huge risks when driving but may be terrified or unwilling to travel on aeroplanes?

Society can also play a part. Social theory suggests that we use cues about the people around us to guide our risk assessment. For example, if smoking killed people more quickly, such that we would see our smoker friends and family quite literally dropping around us, it would make it much easier to comprehend the risks involved. Instead however, such distant threats allow us to distance ourselves from it and even when we do think about it we often identify ourselves with the survivors, even if they are in the minority.

Even with more immediate dangers, social influences play a part. A study of Israeli road traffic accidents in 2004 showed that there was a link between how safely people drove and how dangerous they perceived the world around them, gauged by the frequency of suicide bombers. During periods of intense suicide bombings the number of deaths from road traffic accidents dropped dramatically. But when the bombing subsided, people started becoming more reckless with their driving, apparently feeling safer in their environment.

Besides psychology, biochemistry also plays a big part in our ability to assess risk, particularly the hormone adrenaline. Designed to enable 'fight or flight', adrenaline is quickly released into the bloodstream at times of stress from the adrenal gland with the effect of increasing blood flow and heart rate, dilating arteries in the legs and the pupils, while restricting dilation in less essential parts of the body, such as the skin and the gut. The overall effect is to very quickly prepare your body for a fight or a rapid retreat.

In the modern and relatively predator-free world, this response appears to manifest itself in a variety of different ways, not least as stress. Even so, the effect it can leave on the body can seriously influence the decisions we make in relation to risk. But while adrenaline can have long-term detrimental effects on some people, others can grow strangely addicted to it – so-called adrenaline junkies.

If you're not convinced, you need only look to the world of extreme sports to see the evidence. In the last decade a new sporting experience of 'no fear' sports has emerged; a class of sports that ranges from the downright dangerous, such as base jumping (parachuting from fixed structures such as buildings and cliffs), cave diving and ice climbing, to the more ridiculous, such as stunt pogo (performing BMX-like tricks on a pogo stick) or noodling (catching fish with your bare hands).

With extreme sports it appears anything goes, provided it involves either an element of danger or exhilaration. Indeed, for extreme sportsmen and women the enjoyment or thrill of their sport is not in spite of the danger but very much because of it. In short, the fear or exhilaration they experience translates very much as pleasure.

Confusing the experience of fear as pleasure is not half as crazy as it sounds. In fact, describing the experience as 'pleasure' may not really be doing it justice as one famous experiment demonstrates.

In 1974, two psychologists carried out an unusual experiment which involved an attractive woman asking men to fill out a questionnaire on two bridges, one relatively low and safe the other dizzyingly high and wobbly. Participants were led to believe that they were taking part in an experiment designed to test creative expression. In fact the set-up was actually a cleverly designed way of testing to see if the men would misattribute the physical arousal caused by being so high up as to being sexually attracted to the woman. The results convincingly showed that fear can indeed be easily misinterpreted as sexual arousal!

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