14 DAY TRIAL // According to the conclusions of a new scientific study, it would appear that adults continue to engage in competitive risk-taking behaviors until they reach the age of 50, sometimes ever more. These results show that this trend extends for several more decades that originally thought.
Adults are more than willing to continue competing with each other in areas such as skill acquisition, monetary rewards or knowledge, even when they don't necessarily have anything to prove to anyone else. Scientists were very surprised to make this discovery.
A downward slope in such behaviors only started registering once test subjects went past the age of 50, say investigators at the University of Oregon. The research team was led by professor of psychology Ulrich Mayr, who was also the author of a new paper detailing the findings.
The work is published in the latest online issue of the medical journal Psychology and Aging. The study group was primarily made up of economists and psychologists, PsychCentral reports.
Scientists only began studying gender differences and risk-taking behavioral patterns in relation to age a few years ago. Since then, this area of research has proven to be very important, and interest in it has grown significantly.
The UO investigation began in 2010, when the researchers recruited a group of high school students, trained them in the art of scientific research, and then asked them to recruit about 800 adult volunteers in turn. The latter were then put through an experimental setup.
Each participant was asked to solve a math problem for a small monetary reward, while also being told that they have a chance to win a larger prize if they solved the problem while directly competing with others.
It became immediately obvious that people below the age of 50 were prepared to go up against each other in direct competition. Individuals older than this displayed a reduced tendency to do so. It was also found that men were slightly more willing to compete than women.
“Competitions are really important as people go after resources, political positioning, college admission, jobs and the like. How well you perform in them determines your success. Maybe it’s all about choices people make. The results of our study were striking and novel, Mayr explains.
“We expected to find the competitive risk-taking going down. Seeing it going up to age 50 was surprising,” concludes Bill Harbaugh, a professor of economics at the University of Oregon.
“We need to understand this drive and gender differences that might be at play. While we saw parallel curves for men and women across the lifespan, it was slightly less strong for women. What are the consequences for men and women?” he concludes.