Bursting balloons - comparison of risk taking between extreme sports, esports, and the general public

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.