Job loss and health threatening events modulate risk-taking behaviours in the Covid-19 emergency

Abstract

Covid-19 pandemic is exerting a tragic impact all around the world. First-person experience of life-threatening and stressful events can modify individuals' risk perception, and, consequently, risk-taking behaviours. Here we investigated risk-taking profiles in 130 Italian residents, and compared healthcare to non-healthcare workers, during the lockdown phase. We ad hoc developed the "Covid-19 Risk Task", including the classic monetary Holt-Laury Paired Lottery Task (Monetary Condition, MC) and two new ecological conditions exploring Covid-19 related risk-taking aptitudes in relation to different health (Health Status Condition, HsC) and employment (Employment Status Condition, EsC) outcomes. Results showed that, in the whole sample, individuals were more risk-averse in MC than in HsC and EsC. Moreover, a payoff increase produced a shift toward more risk-averse behaviours in MC, but not in HsC and EsC, where we found an opposite trend suggesting a more risk-loving behaviour. Finally, we found that healthcare workers were significantly less risk-averse compared to non-healthcare workers in EsC, but not in MC and HsC. These findings provided evidence of the possible effects of Covid-19 outbreak on risk-taking aptitudes. The negative impact on human choices and, consequently, on the whole world economy of this catastrophic life event must not be underestimated.

Figure 1

Classification of risk-taking profiles. The figure shows the proportion of different risk-taking profiles—i.e., risk-loving (blue sector), risk-neutral (green sector), mildly (yellow sector) and highly (red sector) risk-averse individuals—in the three Cov19-RT conditions considering the whole sample (n = 130), the healthcare workers group (n = 65) and non-healthcare workers group (n = 65).

Figure 2

Incentive effect in the Cov19-RT conditions. The figure illustrates the incentive effect in the three different conditions in the whole group (n = 130), with the blue line representing the Series 1 (low payoff) and the green one depicting Series 2 (high payoff). In particular, we report, for each Series and condition, the average response in terms of percentages of safe choices (y-axis) for each of the 10 lottery rows (x-axis).