Attitudes and Behaviors among Soldiers in Dangerous Contexts: A Review of Literature with a Special Focus on Risk-taking and Sensation seeking

The article is based on a literature review of attitudes and behaviors in dangerous military contexts. Literature was gathered through an extensive search procedure in academic databases by keywords in different combinations.... [ view full abstract ]

The article is based on a literature review of attitudes and behaviors in dangerous military contexts. Literature was gathered through an extensive search procedure in academic databases by keywords in different combinations. The first part of the article presents the main bibliographic findings. Altogether 226 articles were grouped into categories relating to main topic, type of inquiry, type of publication, institutional affiliation and geographic area. The largest thematic categories were “Combat zone experiences”, “Performance under pressure”, “Risk-taking”, “Leadership”; and “Combat motivation”. Among personality variables “Sensation seeking” had attracted most interest.
The second and largest part of the article presents a review of literature related to the two central thematic categories “risk-taking” and “sensation seeking”. Since warfare and military conflicts are dangerous pursuits one could have imagined a lot of empirical research about risk-taking and sensation seeking in the military. We have found this not to be the case. The research is small in volume and also scattered when it comes to use of theories, methods and samples of military personnel. In general, there seems to be few clear research paradigms. The results of the empirical studies show that there are adaptive as well as non-adaptive forms of risk-taking in relation to military situations. Similarly military personnel scoring high on sensation seeking have certain advantages, for instance dealing with stress and risk, but may also cause problems of various kinds. The article ends with pointing out implications for research and for practice.

Keywords: military, soldiers, danger, risk-taking, sensation seeking