The authors conducted a meta-analysis of 150 studies in which the risk-taking tendencies of male and female participants were compared. Studies were coded with respect to type of task (e.g., self-reported behaviors vs. observed behaviors), task content (e.g., smoking vs. sex), and 5 age levels. Results showed that the average effects for 14 out of 16 types of risk taking were significantly larger than 0 (indicating greater risk taking in male participants) and that nearly half of the effects were greater than .20. However, certain topics (e.g., intellectual risk taking and physical skills) produced larger gender differences than others (e.g., smoking). In addition, the authors found that (a) there were significant shifts in the size of the gender gap between successive age levels, and (b) the gender gap seems to be growing smaller over time. The discussion focuses on the meaning of the results for theories of risk taking and the need for additional studies to clarify age trends.Risk taking is an important form of human behavior that has been the subject of numerous investigations, scholarly analyses, and policy debates (Byrnes, 1998;Slovic, Lichtenstein, & Fischhoff, 1988). To a large extent, most researchers point to the association between risky behaviors (e.g., unprotected sex) and serious health problems (e.g., sexually transmitted diseases) when they provide reasons for studying the former (e.g., DiClemente, Hansen, & Ponton, 1995). However, others have also argued that risk taking should be studied because of its relevance to three important issues in the field of psychology: the adaptiveness of human behavior (Byrnes, 1998;Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1993), the rationality of human thought (Baron, 1994), and the relative importance of genes versus the environment in determining the phenotypic expression of traits (Wilson & Daly, 1985;Zuckerman, 1991). In essence, then, researchers have examined risk taking for a variety of reasons. Correspondingly, the literature on risk taking is both vast and diverse.In the present article, we review that portion of the literature that is concerned with gender differences. From a scientific standpoint, gender differences are of interest because they can often precipitate important theoretical advances in a particular area of inquiry (Halpern, 1992). For example, the existence of gender differences on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) prompted many researchers to search for possible causes of this difference. One of the most important outcomes of this line of work was the finding that much of the variance in SAT scores can be explained by course work and math knowledge (e.g., Byrnes & Takahira, 1993). We hoped to precipitate similar advances in the field of risk taking.Our review is organized as follows. In the first section of this article, we discuss issues related to the definition and assessment of risk taking to provide an interpretive context for the rest of the

Two experiments were conducted to explore the relation between conceptual and procedural knowledge in the domain of mathematics. The simultaneous activation view, which argues that computational errors arise from impoverished concepts and that errors can be eliminated by giving concrete referents to symbols, was compared with the dynamic interaction view, which argues for distinct systems that interact diachronically and for a progressive independence of procedural knowledge with expertise. Experiment 1 revealed that many 4th-and 6th-grade children possess significant conceptual knowledge but made computational errors nevertheless. In Experiment 2, a Longitudinal Guttman Simplex analysis revealed that 5th graders mastered conceptual knowledge before they mastered procedural knowledge. Results across studies support the dynamic interaction view.Recently, a number of cognitive theorists have argued for a distinction between conceptual and procedural knowledge. This distinction has been applied broadly to various aspects of cognition, such as memory (

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The present study examined children's comprehension of certainty and uncertainty within the context of concrete and propositional reasoning tasks. First, third, and fifth graders were given Pieraut-LeBonniec's (1980) box task and a multisufficient causality task to assess reasoning about certainty and uncertainty in concrete contexts. Children were also given conditional syllogisms to assess this ability in a propositional context. Half of the children at each grade were given contramanded syllogism task statements intended to block erroneous conversational inferences made about these conditional statements. Results indicated no developmental differences in reasoning about concrete certainty, but significant improvement occurred in reasoning about concrete uncertainty. On syllogisms, only the fifth graders benefitted from contramanding so as to demonstrate an understanding of propositional uncertainty. Correlational and error analyses showed that the discrimination between certainty and uncertainty is mastered in concrete contexts prior to the time when this discrimination occurs in propositional contexts. These findings support the position that reasoning about concrete certainty and uncertainty requires a different competence than that required for reasoning about propositional certainty and uncertainty.