Do older people take fewer risks?

Whether and how risk-taking propensity varies over a person’s life span depends in part on how risk taking is measured, research concludes. When subjects are asked how they assess their risk propensity, a clear reduction with age is the result. However, this reduction is not necessarily observed for specific risk-taking tasks. Depending on the type of task set, the propensity measured in older people can be unchanged, lower or higher. These heterogeneous results could be caused by an age-related functional change in the brain.