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Introduction
The study of risk propensity has a long and rich history of inquiry in various disciplines such as biology, economics, and psychology (see Mishra 2014 for a recent overview). In the evolutionary psychological sciences, currently, the main debates mostly revolve around the role that life-history variables and the early living environment have on risk propensity, what part sexual selection may have played in shaping risk-seeking behavior, and how risk-taking can be operationalized and measured when researchers are interested in studying risky behavior from a functional perspective.
Exploring Risky Behavior in a Life-History Framework
Life-history theory, a theory subset of evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology, argues that biological aspects of the life course result from trade-offs when allocating finite effort among survival, current reproduction, and future reproduction (Chisholm 1993). The underlying logic is...
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References
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Wilke, A. (2018). Risky Behavior. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_220-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_220-1
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