Psychobabble

Look Before You Leap

By Shauna Stephenson

Are women pre-disposed to be more risk averse than male adventurers?

Be daring or be cautious? Every woman worth her salt has encountered a scenario like this: My biking buddies and I were cruising downtrail when we came to a stream. George Anadiotis, the more advanced rider of the bunch, suggested that we could ride down to find a better crossing, but if we were really hardcore…

The daring rider would rip down the singletrack, launch off a rock, stick the landing, and pedal like hell to get out before getting stuck. Misjudge the landing and you end up on the crotch-shot segment of America’s Funniest Home Videos.

I hesitated, considering my options. The whole thing had a general “bad idea” stench to it.

Meanwhile, Curtis Martindale was preparing for takeoff. This apparently wasn’t even a question to him. As he approached the rock, pedaling furiously, a scarier thought occurred to me: Am I a wimp?

What I didn’t know was that, at that particular moment, my own biology was working against me.

“It’s not at all that women are risk averse,” says Jody Radtke, program director for the Women’s Wilderness Institute in Boulder, Colorado. When men are confronted with challenging situations, they typically produce adrenaline, which is what causes them to run around, hollering like frat boys at a kegger. An adrenaline rush is a good feeling, but when confronted with the same situation, women produce a different chemical, called acetylcholine.

“Pretty much what [acetylcholine] does is it makes you want to vomit,” says Jody.

Because women don’t have the same positive chemical reward, they tend to be less pumped about confronting stressful situations. This leads them to rely on decision-making. Essentially, they want the whole picture before they go diving in.

Research, Jody says, shows that women have more cross-networking between the two hemispheres of the brain, which subconsciously allows them to evaluate different sensory cues, facts, and emotions when making decisions. The cause of this difference probably lies somewhere in the debate of nature versus nurture and the history of evolution.

Marvin Zuckerman, professor emeritus at the University of Delaware, has studied risk for decades. He found that men are typically more likely to take risks when seeking novel or exciting sensations, and that comes from both genetics and environment.

“What’s important seems to be the environment that isn’t shared by siblings in the same family,” he says.

So here’s the basic breakdown: Genetics determines predisposition to risk taking. We then seek out individuals (friends, partners, spouses) who are like us, which reinforces those tendencies.

But what determines the genetics? General theory says evolution. Throughout our history as a species, risk has benefited us in such things as mate selection and expansion of territory, says Zuckerman, although hard evidence is tough to come by and the research continues.

But the extent of evolution is in the eye of the beholder. Launching off the rock, Curtis misjudged his landing, cementing my hunch about going around. Why they design men’s bikes with high bars in the center I’ll never know.

Blood trickled down his shins, and he nursed his wounds as I continued upstream, musing something about a woman’s intuition.