In psychological research, there is a general consensus that fear decreases risk taking. This belief influences politics, marketing, and even public health; but for years various studies have reported highly varying levels of this effect, or even a total absence of the effect.
In this paper, Sean Wake, our former lab manager, worked with Jolie Wormwood, PI of the Affective and Social Psychophysiology Lab at the University of New Hampshire, to conduct a meta-analysis from over 2000 papers identified as relevant to the topic. The group ultimately used data from 50 papers, addressing a total of 136 effect sizes.
Ultimately, this research found that the effect of fear on risk taking is highly variable across different studies. Some variability can be explained by moderating factors such as reward, but much of the variance remains unexplained. Check out the full paper for more information.
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