An evolutionary domain-specific risk scale

We present a psychometric scale that assesses risk-taking in 10 evolutionary content domains: between-group competition, within-group competition, status-power, environmental exploration, food selection, food acquisition, parent-offspring conflict, kinship, mate attraction, and mate retention. We report on three studies that evaluate the scale's validity and consistency for a sample of 1,326 participants who rated their likelihood of engagement in, the perceived riskiness of, and the benefit associated with various risky activities. Behaviors were framed as modern-day analogues of qualitatively similar actions in recurring problem domains of the ancestral environment that were potentially beneficial but also potentially costly to survival and reproductive success. As expected, respondents' degree of risk-taking was not consistently riskaverse or risk-seeking across content domains, and a set of eight life-history variables had domain-specific effects on risk-taking propensity. In most domains, men were significantly more risk-seeking than women, but in 2 of the 10 domains-food selection and kinship risks-women were more risk-prone than men. Participants who reported not being married or in a committed relationship scored significantly higher in the domains of mate attraction and mate retention. Age, reproductive goalsetting, parental status, number of siblings, and birth order also affected the formation of risk thresholds.