However, there’s a limit to how far logical considerations like these go, says Petko Kusev, a professor of behavioral science at the U.K.’s University of Huddersfield who studies risk-taking and decision-making. While some people generally have higher risk tolerances than others, it’s not a fixed measure for anyone; your mood, surroundings, company and even hormones all influence your perception of risk and benefit from one moment to the next. So even if you think you’re making calculated decisions about what’s safe to do, you may be swayed by these factors more than you realize. “People are not really good computational creatures,” he says.
Humans also tend to “focus very little on the probability [of something actually happening] and much more on the [potential] negative outcome” of a decision, says Robyn Wilson, a professor of risk analysis and decision science at the Ohio State University. For example, plane crashes are extremely rare, but many people are terrified of flying because of how grisly occasional crashes are. Threats that are new or unknown also tend to make people avoid risk—highly relevant during the pandemic, when scary new developments are constant.
It is possible to be excessively risk averse, Wilson says. “You have to ask the question of, ‘What other harm is coming from that decision?’” she says. There aren’t many downsides to, say, getting takeout instead of dining inside a restaurant. But for bigger issues, like whether to stay isolated from loved ones or keep kids out of school, there are consequences worth considering, Wilson says.
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