ArticleScientific reports2015
Risk sensitivity as an evolutionary adaptation.
Article in Scientific reports, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 71 citations in OpenAlex.
- Distinct patterns of social contagion under risk and ambiguity.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- The perceived COVID-19 pandemic risk and mental distress in China: the mediating role of interpersonal trust and the moderating role of social cohesion.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Impaired arbitration between reward-related decision-making strategies in Alcohol Users compared to Alcohol Non-Users: a computational modeling study.NPP - digital psychiatry and neuroscience · 2025Article
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- Extinction scenarios in evolutionary processes: a multinomial Wright-Fisher approach.Journal of mathematical biology · 2023Article
- Microgravity induces overconfidence in perceptual decision-making.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The influence of ergodicity on risk affinity of timed and non-timed respondents.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Selfish risk-seeking can provide an evolutionary advantage in a conditional public goods game.PloS one · 2022Article
- Toward a productive evolutionary understanding of music.The Behavioral and brain sciences · 2021Article
- Accuracy-Risk Trade-Off Due to Social Learning in Crowd-Sourced Financial Predictions.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- The adaptive value of probability distortion and risk-seeking in macaques' decision-making.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Age Influences Loss Aversion Through Effects on Posterior Cingulate Cortical Thickness.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2021Article
- Assessing Physician Adherence to Guidelines for Cervical Cancer Screening and Management of Abnormal Screening Results.Journal of lower genital tract disease · 2020Article
- Bet-hedging across generations can affect the evolution of variance-sensitive strategies within generations.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Human-specific mutations in VMAT1 confer functional changes and multi-directional evolution in the regulation of monoamine circuits.BMC evolutionary biology · 2019Article
- Evolution of risk preference is determined by reproduction dynamics, life history, and population size.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Learning about and from others' prudence, impatience or laziness: The computational bases of attitude alignment.PLoS computational biology · 2017Article
- Doubt in the Insula: Risk Processing in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Risk aversion is a common behavior universal to humans and animals alike. Economists have traditionally defined risk preferences by the curvature of the utility function. Psychologists and behavioral economists also make use of concepts such as loss aversion and probability weighting to model risk aversion. Neurophysiological evidence suggests that loss aversion has its origins in relatively ancient neural circuitries (e.g., ventral striatum). Could there thus be an evolutionary origin to risk aversion? We study this question by evolving strategies that adapt to play the equivalent mean payoff gamble. We hypothesize that risk aversion in this gamble is beneficial as an adaptation to living in small groups, and find that a preference for risk averse strategies only evolves in small populations of less than 1,000 individuals, or in populations segmented into groups of 150 individuals or fewer - numbers thought to be comparable to what humans encountered in the past. We observe that risk aversion only evolves when the gamble is a rare event that has a large impact on the individual's fitness. As such, we suggest that rare, high-risk, high-payoff events such as mating and mate competition could have driven the evolution of risk averse behavior in humans living in small groups.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.