Researcher Questions Whether Women More Risk-Averse Than Men

by Susanna Kim

ABC News
September 30, 2012

While previous academic research has shown women to be less willing to engage in risk than men in situations like gambling, a new economics paper released this week finds men can be just as risk-averse, if not more.

Julie Nelson, chairwoman of the economics department at University of Massachusetts-Boston, wrote “Are Women Really More Risk-Averse Than Men?” as a working paper this week.

Julie A. Nelson

“The paper finds a lot of the economics and finance research in behavioral differences between men and women is vastly exaggerated,” Nelson said.

Nelson and a research assistant reviewed more than 24 published articles about the subject, many of which studied men and women’s gambling habits and often concluded that women were less willing to gamble.

“My paper goes over the literature and says ‘not so fast,’” she said.

Nelson often found small differences in the averages of the two genders that measured how willing they were to take risks.

“Academic articles hide that there is a lot of overlap between men and women,” Nelson said.

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Thinking Fast Can Mean Doing Good

by Daniel Akst

Wall Street Journal
September 25, 2012

Is it better to act intuitively or after lots of consideration? The question has had a lot of attention in recent years.

Books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink remind us of how effectively we can perceive and decide in an instant. But Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow focuses on the pitfalls of our intuitive system as well as its strengths.

Perhaps the real challenge is figuring out when to use which; Freud suggested that we deliberate by all means over small matters (spread collar or button down? Fish or chicken?) but that on really big decisions, like whom to marry, it was best to go with your gut.

Now comes a study based on a series of Harvard experiments, showing that people are more likely to act for the collective good—and less likely to pursue self-interest—when they act intuitively.

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