Bursting balloons - comparison of risk taking between extreme sports, esports, and the general public

Abstract Arguably, extreme sports athletes exhibit a more significant risk appetite than the general public. Are standard behavioral measures able to capture this? To answer this question, we assessed self-reports of taking and measured risk-taking behavior samples snowboarders climbers. Two groups non-athletes, university students crowdworkers, sport that does not include potential grave injury or death, esports athletes, serve as control conditions complement our study. Across these five different groups, 1313 participants performed an online version Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) gave willingness take risks sports-specific taking. Extreme exhibited greater in BART non-athletes athletes. Furthermore, BART-performance predicted its affective consequences. Our results speak BART’s ecological validity unique role physical consequences on behavior.