Abstract
Arguably, extreme sports athletes exhibit a more significant risk appetite than the general public. Are standard behavioral risk measures able to capture this? To answer this question, we assessed self-reports of risk taking and measured the risk-taking behavior of samples of snowboarders and climbers. Two groups of non-athletes, university students and crowdworkers, and athletes of a sport that does not include the potential of grave injury or death, esports athletes, serve as control conditions and complement our study. Across these five different groups, 1313 participants performed an online version of the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) and gave self-reports of general willingness to take risks and sports-specific risk taking. Extreme sports athletes exhibited greater risk taking in the BART than non-athletes and esports athletes. Furthermore, BART-performance predicted sports-specific risk taking and its affective consequences. Our results speak to the BART’s ecological validity and the unique role of physical consequences on risk-taking behavior.
Highlights
Taking risks is an essential part of life
Some other sports involve risks with potential bodily harm, like going for a grab trick after a botched takeoff in snowboarding, risking potential injuries, or participating in other extreme sports where errors can have fatal consequences (Cohen et al, 2018). It is unclear whether athletes who risk physical harm in their sports differ in their risk appetite from the general public or athletes whose sports involve similar training schedules but not such physical consequences
We investigate to which degree sports-specific risk appetite can be captured by the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) beyond self-reports
Summary
Taking risks is an essential part of life. It is often necessary to advance, push boundaries, or succeed. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission It is unclear whether athletes who risk physical harm in their sports differ in their risk appetite from the general public or athletes whose sports involve similar training schedules but not such physical consequences. In this article, we compare extreme sports athletes (climbers, snowboarders) with esports athletes (competitive video game players; Pedraza-Ramirez et al, 2020) and the general public (students, crowdworkers) using one of the most popular behavioral risk-elicitation tasks, the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART; Lejuez et al, 2002), along with self-reports of general and sports-specific risk taking. Barlow et al (2013) argue that agency (i.e., the experience of acting in a certain, autonomous way), not sensation seeking, drives athletes These findings seemingly contradict each other as athletes exert more risky behaviors but are not necessarily more risk taking in self-report measures
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