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Hypothesis: Yes
12/14/2016
Weve all heard the stereotypes,males at LASA are seen to be adventurous, daring and
risking often times to a fault. Looking at movies, television, and video games it is not hard to see
examples of these male characters. Women on the other hand are often portrayed to be more
timid, calculated and cautious. Today many people see these stereotypes as harmful, and
Regardless of all this social context, I came here to answer one question. Is this
stereotype rooted in any kind of truth? The ramifications of this can be important in different
aspects of society. Research has been done in the field already to quantify and explain if there is
a difference. In 2006 researchers in San Diego conducted an experiment with over 600
participants in order to study this phenomena. Asking questions about gambling, health,
recreation, and social situation the study found that women were substantially less likely to take
risks than men. This has big implications in realms such as public health. For example, men are
more likely to get killed in car accidents as they take risks by speeding and not wearing their
seatbelts. This is part of the reason that the life expectancy for men is less than women.
Hypothesis: Males at LASA are more likely to take risks than females
The first step to testing this hypothesis is defining the risk that I am going to use in my
experiment. For simplicity's sake this is the scenario that I came up with. A person is given two
options.
Option 2: The experimenter will flip a coin. If the coin lands heads the participant will receive 2
candies; if the coin lands tails the participant will receive no candy.
If the participant chooses Option 1, then they will be deemed a non risk taker. If they choose
The next step was finding an appropriate population to test this experiment on. For
convenience's sake I decided to chose the LASA senior class as my population, and take a 10%
sample. I decided to do this because collecting data from both other grades or outside of LASA
would be very difficult to do in the timeframe that was outlined. Also by only choosing one
grade, I can control for age in my experiment which otherwise could be a confounding variable.
After I determined a population, it is time to construct a sample. Since I am looking to males and
females it is only obvious that I block for gender. 10% of the population of LASA is around 24
people, and there are roughly the same number of males as females at LASA. So I will simple
After creating my blocked random sample I went about collecting data. Getting in contact
with all of my participants was a bit of a challenge as not everyone uses Facebook, and even if
they did people were sometimes unresponsive. However, by pacing the hallways in the morning
and lunch, combined with incessant messaging I eventually managed to conduct my experiment
From these results it looks like there is a significant difference between senior males and
senior females at LASA in regard to risk taking. 9/12 or 75% of senior males at LASA were risk
takers, while 6/12 or 50% of senior females at LASA were risk takers. From this we can observe
that senior males at LASA are more likely to take risks than senior females at LASA.
The experiment contained the three principles of experimental design: replication
randomization and control. It had replication because the experiment was repeated 24 times
among all the members of the sample. Randomization existed because the sample was randomly
chosen after blocking for gender. Lastly the experiment contained control as for the most part the
experiment was carried out in the same way. I told the participants of the two options and had
A confounding variables that could skew my data is time of day. Not all the experiments
were carried out at the same time, so if the time of day has an effect on risk taking it could also
There is another possible evolutionary explanation for gender differences in risk that might also
be worth considering, which we will term the offspring risk hypothesis. Perhaps women have a
tendency to see greater risks than men see, not because of different selection pressure relating to
mate seeking, but rather because if one perceives more risks in the world, one will be more
effective at keeping safe any offspring under ones care. Human infants are exceptionally
experiment that I ran, that males at LASA take more risks than females at LASA. This proves the
hypothesis correct. If I had more time and resources I would try to sample a better population,
maybe Austin as a whole or the entire United States. This would prove extremely difficult to pull
off but would yield more meaningful results as the ones I have can now only be applied to
LASA seniors.
Works Cited:
Harris, Christine R., Michael Jenkins, and Dale Glaser. "Gender Differences in Risk Assessment:
Why Do Women Take Fewer Risks than Men?" Judgment and Decision Making 1.1
(2006): 48-63. Web.
Appendix A
Person RiskTaker
Henderson, Aidan Janette N
Jensen, Hannah Grace N
Hansen, Olivia Isabella Y
Wilson, Caitlyn Brooke Y
Girardeau, Anna Rose Y
Wang, Kristine L N
Wynn, Cameron Lauren Y
Eccles, Mara A N
Xia, Amanda Yuan Y
Lopez Rojas, Guadalupe N
Dawson, Casey Rose N
Dadoush, Karma Y