Does Medical Risk Perception and Risk Taking Change with Age?

Abstract

Across adulthood, people face increasingly more risky medical problems and decisions. However, little is known about changes in medical risk taking across adulthood. Therefore, the current cross-sectional study investigated age-related differences in medical risk taking with N = 317 adults aged 20-77 years using newly developed scenarios to assess medical risk taking, and additional measures designed to evaluate risk-taking behavior in the medical domain. Greater expected benefits on the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking Scale-Medical (DOSPERT-M) predicted more active risk taking, whereas higher perceived risk predicted less active risk taking. Next, we examined differences in active and passive risk taking, where passive risk taking refers to risk taking that is associated with inaction. Age was associated with less passive risk taking, but not with active risk taking, risk perception, or expected benefits on the DOSPERT-M. Participants were overall more likely to opt for taking medical action than not, even more so for a scenario about a vaccine for a deadly flu than for a scenario about a chemotherapy treatment for cancer. Overall, participants were more likely to accept medication (vaccine or chemotherapy) for their child than for themselves. Increasing age was associated with a lower likelihood of accepting the treatment or vaccine for oneself. Taken together, our study provides important insights about changes in medical risk taking across adulthood when people face an increasing number of complex and risky medical decisions.

Reaping the Benefits and Avoiding the Risks: Unrealistic Optimism in the Health Domain

“…Rather, numeracy levels (whether objective or subjective) were largely unrelated to participants’ responses. This finding is in line with an earlier study (Hanoch, Rolison, & Freund, ) that also found no link between numeracy and medical risk taking. Thus, our finding suggests that improving numeracy skills might not help solve the problem of misjudging risks and benefits of medical procedures.…”

Risk Perception in a Real-World Situation (COVID-19): How It Changes From 18 to 87 Years Old

“…Few studies have examined the age-related differences in risk perception using hypothetical reallife situations (e.g., Hanoch et al, 2018;Sun and Sun, 2019). Recently, the COVID-19 outbreak gave researchers the opportunity to focus on the perception of risk across the lifespan applied to a real-life situation (Bruine de Bruin, 2020;Pasion et al, 2020;Guastafierro et al, 2021;Kivi et al, 2021).…”

Experimental Evidence on Socioeconomic Differences in Risk‐Taking and Risk Premiums

“…The findings suggest that, holding all other factors constant, our sampled older commuters would be more risk‐taking than young ones, while higher‐income subjects would be less risk‐taking. Existing evidence on systematic heterogeneity in risk‐taking is mixed (see, for example, Hao et al ., 2016; Hanoch et al ., 2018). Mata et al .…”