Risk Attitudes

Dohmen et al. (2011) asked respondents about their risk attitude with a single item.

How do you see yourself: are you generally a person who is fully prepared to take risks or do you try to avoid taking risks?

They found decently sized correlations with decisions in a lottery experiment and domain-specific risk attitudes. They also found it could predict risky behaviors such as holding stocks, driving a car, doing sports, being self-employed, and smoking.

Notably, they find that the general measure is a good predictor, but that context-specific measures of risk are more powerful predictors of risk in the same context.

References

Dohmen, T., Falk, A., Huffman, D., Sunde, U., Schupp, J., & Wagner, G. G. (2011). Individual risk attitudes: Measurement, determinants, and behavioral consequences. Journal of the European Economic Association, 9(3), 522–550. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1542-4774.2011.01015.x