Genetic Influences on Risk Preference in Adolescence: Results from a Multivariate Twin Study

Risk preference is an important concept in the behavioral sciences that captures individual differences in people’s decisions and behaviors in situations involving possible losses and rewards. Risk preferences change with... [ view full abstract ]

Risk preference is an important concept in the behavioral sciences that captures individual differences in people’s decisions and behaviors in situations involving possible losses and rewards. Risk preferences change with development, and adolescents are particularly likely to engage in risk-taking behaviors. Developmental theories of risk-taking in adolescence have suggested that, rather than being a unitary construct, risk preference actually captures a number of distinct psychological processes. In a diverse sample of 810 adolescent twins and triplets (M age = 15.9 years, SD = 1.4 years) from the Texas Twin Project, we investigated the factor structure of fifteen self-report and task-based measures relevant to risk preference in adolescence. Factor analyses suggest that these measures can be organized into four, genetically-separable factors, which we labeled premeditation, fearlessness, cognitive dyscontrol, and reward seeking. Most behavioral measures contained large amounts of task-specific variance; however, most genetic variance in each measure was shared with other measures of the corresponding factor. Behavior genetic analyses further indicated that genetic influences on cognitive dyscontrol overlapped nearly perfectly with genetic influences on IQ (r_A = −0.91), whereas other dimensions of risk preference were largely distinct from IQ. These findings underscore the limitations of using single measures of risk preference in isolation, and indicate that the study of adolescent risk-taking will benefit from applying multimethod approaches. Finally, we discuss how this line of research can be integrated with results from recent genome-wide association studies of risk preference.