On Measuring Engineering Risk Attitudes

Abstract

Theories of rational decision making hold that decision makers should select the best alternative from the available choices, but it is now well known that decision makers employ heuristics and are subject to a set of psychological biases. Risk aversion or risk seeking attitude has a framing effect and can bias the decision maker towards inaction or action. Understanding decision-makers’ attitudes to risk is thus integral to understanding how they make decisions and psychological biases that might be at play. This paper presents the Engineering-Domain-Specific Risk-Taking (E-DOSPERT) test to measure the risk aversion and risk seeking attitude that engineers have in four domains of engineering risk management: identification, analysis, evaluation and treatment. The creation of the instrument, an analysis of its reliability based on surveying undergraduate engineering students in Australia and the United States, and the validity of the four domains are discussed. The instrument is found to be statistically reliable to measure engineering risk aversion and risk seeking, and to measure engineering risk aversion and risk seeking to risk identification and risk treatment. However, factor analysis of the results suggest that four other domains may better describe the factors in engineers’ attitude to risk.