When Determining Risk Tolerance, Gray Matter Matters
Sunday, September 14, 2014 - 11:00
in Psychology & Sociology
There is a link between our brain structure and our tolerance of risk, find economists who say they have found the first stable 'biomarker' for financial risk-attitudes. Does that mean there is a causal link between brain structure and behavior? Neuroscientists and psychologists tend to fall into that trap but the scholars in the Journal of Neuroscience avoid that trap. Dr Agnieszka Tymula, an economist at the University of Sydney, and colleagues found that the gray matter volume of a region in the right posterior parietal cortex was significantly predictive of individual risk attitudes. Men and women with higher gray matter volume in this region exhibited less risk aversion. read more