Picture two people weighing the same investment decision: a 30-year-old and a 70-year-old. Common wisdom says the younger person will roll the dice while the older one plays it safe. But is that actually true? And if it is, does it show up no matter how you measure someone’s appetite for risk?
A new meta-analysis published in the Journal of Economic Psychology takes on this question by pulling together decades of research from economics and psychology. The central takeaway is that the answer depends heavily on the tool researchers use to gauge risk attitudes. When people simply report their own comfort with risk, or make bets with clearly stated odds, older adults do tend to be more cautious. But when risk is measured through certain psychological games, the pattern can flip or fade away entirely.
Why the question matters beyond the individual
The motivation for this research reaches past personal finance. Many wealthy countries face aging populations, with fewer young workers supporting more retirees. Erica Ordali and Chiara Rapallini of the University of Florence point out that if people grow more risk-averse as they age, an older society might steer its money toward safer, less productive activities. Some earlier research has linked higher aggregate risk aversion in a country to lower productivity and less self-employment. So understanding whether caution really rises with age has economic weight.
The trouble is that the existing evidence is a mess of contradictions. Some studies find that risk aversion climbs steadily with age. Others find the opposite, or no clear pattern at all. Ordali and Rapallini set out to figure out whether these disagreements reflect something real about human behavior or whether they come from the different ways researchers measure risk in the first place.
Three ways to measure a taste for risk
To understand the study, it helps to know the main methods researchers use. The first is self-assessment: surveys ask people to rate their own willingness to take risks, sometimes on a simple scale, sometimes through hypothetical investment choices. The second is the lottery, where people choose between a safe payout and a gamble with known odds. The third is a set of psychological tasks in which the odds are hidden and must be learned through trial and error.
Two of these tasks come up often. In the Balloon Analogue Risk Task, or BART, participants pump up a virtual balloon to earn money. Each pump adds to the potential reward but also raises the chance the balloon pops and wipes out that round’s earnings. More pumps signal more risk-taking. In the Iowa Gambling Task, or IGT, people draw cards from four decks. Two decks offer big immediate rewards but worse long-term results, while two offer smaller but steadier gains. Learning to favor the safer decks is treated as the more cautious strategy.
The authors stress a key difference between these approaches. In lotteries and surveys, the probabilities are spelled out. In the BART and IGT, they are not, so the tasks capture what economists call decision-making under ambiguity, where players have to figure out the risks as they go.
Building the sample
Ordali and Rapallini started with a wide search of academic databases, screening more than 1,600 documents. They applied filters to keep only studies written in English, published between 1990 and 2023, that measured financial risk-taking in adults across age groups. They set aside research on children and adolescents, since that age group is still developing, and excluded studies that used investment portfolios as a stand-in for risk attitudes, reasoning that portfolios may reflect a financial adviser’s choices rather than a person’s own preferences.
After a multi-step screening and coding process, they arrived at 46 peer-reviewed studies, from which they pulled 111 separate effect sizes. Because the studies used such varied methods, the researchers sorted them into six subgroups based on how risk was measured and whether age was treated as a sliding scale or as a comparison between distinct young and old groups. They then converted all the different statistics into a common measure, a correlation coefficient, so the results could be compared on equal footing. Participant ages across the studies ranged from 18 to 100.
The subgroups differed enormously in scale. The self-assessment studies, drawing on large national surveys, averaged nearly 82,000 participants each. The lottery and task-based studies, often run in labs, typically ranged from a few dozen to a few thousand participants.
What the analysis revealed
The survey-based studies showed a positive and statistically significant link between age and risk aversion, meaning older people reported being more cautious. The size of the effect was small, but consistent. Lottery studies comparing younger and older groups pointed the same way: older adults came out as more risk-averse. Since self-reports and lottery choices lined up, the authors read this as evidence that the two methods capture something similar.
The psychological tasks told a different story. Looking at all the task-based studies together, the relationship between age and caution was negative but not statistically significant, hinting that older adults might actually take more risks in these games. Digging deeper, the researchers found that this reversal was driven mainly by the BART. In balloon-pumping studies, risk aversion appeared to decrease with age, the opposite of the survey findings. Results for the IGT and other tasks were weaker and less clear.
The authors offer an explanation rooted in learning. Because tasks like the BART and IGT hide the odds, players must learn them through experience. They suggest older adults may learn these hidden patterns less efficiently, so their behavior in the game may not reflect their true preferences. Surveys and standard lotteries, by contrast, require no learning, which may be why they produce cleaner results.
One more pattern stood out. In lotteries involving losses rather than gains, older adults showed greater loss aversion, meaning they were more sensitive to the prospect of losing money than younger people were.
Health and cognition enter the picture
The researchers ran an additional analysis on the survey studies, testing what might account for the wide variation among them. Two factors mattered. First, studies that followed the same people over time, rather than taking a single snapshot, tended to find a weaker link between aging and risk aversion. Second, studies that accounted for participants’ health status also found a weaker association.
The authors interpret this to mean that health tends to decline with age, so studies that ignore health may be crediting age with an effect that partly belongs to failing health. A similar logic applies to cognitive ability, which also tends to slip with age. In other words, part of what looks like a pure aging effect may actually reflect changes in health and mental sharpness that travel alongside getting older.
Caveats worth keeping in mind
The researchers are candid about the limits of what they can conclude. For the loss-lottery and task-based studies, they found some signs of publication bias or too few studies to be confident, so those results deserve caution. They also note that their analysis covers only healthy older adults. Aging often brings illness and medication, and some drugs, including certain treatments for Parkinson’s disease, can dramatically alter how people take risks. National surveys and lab tasks rarely record which medications participants take, leaving a gap in the evidence.
The broader message from Ordali and Rapallini is that a seemingly simple question, whether we get more cautious with age, has no single answer detached from method. For anyone reading headlines about how age reshapes financial behavior, the study is a reminder that the measuring stick shapes the finding. It also points researchers toward better tools: long-running studies that track the same people over the years, and questionnaires that account for health and cognitive change.
