How a New Psychological Study Maps the 100 Most Common Risky Choices People Face Today

A new 2025 study published in Psychological Science takes a fresh look at how people make risky decisions in the real world, moving far beyond the outdated laboratory scenarios that have dominated behavioral research for decades. Instead of relying on hypothetical lotteries, gambling tasks, or researcher-invented dilemmas, a team led by Renato Frey, a psychology professor at the University of Zurich, turned directly to everyday people and asked them about the actual risky choices they encounter in their lives.

The researchers wanted to understand what modern risk truly looks like—not what textbooks from the 1970s or 1980s have defined as risk. With today’s fast-changing world shaped by globalization, technology, shifting job markets, and evolving social pressures, the nature of risky choices is constantly in flux. Yet the scientific tools used to study human decision-making have not always kept up. This study attempts to update that understanding using a bottom-up, data-driven approach, gathering thousands of real examples and sorting them into an organized and comprehensive inventory.

The research ultimately identified 100 frequently experienced risky choices that modern adults face, grouped by life domain and analyzed for how common they are, which demographics experience them most, and whether the prevalence of these choices shifts over time—especially during major social disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic. Below is a clear breakdown of the study’s methods, findings, and implications.

A Large-Scale Look at Real-World Risk

The project collected responses from over 4,380 participants in Switzerland across two large studies, followed by an additional sample of 933 people for extra validation. The researchers deliberately sought a diverse population covering a wide range of ages and a balance of genders to ensure the results reflect broad life experiences.

Participants were asked a straightforward but intentionally flexible question: report one risky choice. The wording varied across participants to avoid narrowing the types of answers. Some were asked about a risky decision they personally made, while others described one made by someone they knew. Some were asked to recount situations where they chose the riskier path, and others described moments when they opted for the safer alternative.

Importantly, the term risky choice was left undefined on purpose. This allowed people to report decisions involving:

• Known risks, where probabilities or potential outcomes are partially understood (e.g., gambling or investing money).
• Uncertain risks, where outcomes cannot be predicted at all (e.g., quitting a job without having another one lined up, starting a business, moving abroad, or making a major medical decision).

This open approach allowed the researchers to capture a much broader and more realistic spectrum of life decisions than traditional lab-based tasks typically measure.

What People Consider Risky Today

After collecting thousands of responses, the team identified 100 unique risky choices. These were categorized into life domains such as occupational, health-related, financial, social, traffic-related, and recreational.

Across all samples, occupational risks were the most commonly reported—by a wide margin. Some of the most frequently mentioned examples included:

• Quitting a job
• Starting a new job
• Changing careers entirely
• Starting a business or becoming self-employed

These findings challenge common assumptions in psychological research, which often focuses on health risks, gambling decisions, or thrill-seeking behaviors. Instead, everyday people are far more preoccupied with career-related uncertainty, likely due to changing job markets, evolving education pathways, and economic pressures.

Following occupational risks, the next most commonly reported domains were:

• Health decisions (surgery, treatments, lifestyle changes)
• Financial choices (investing, buying a house, taking loans)
• Social choices (relationships, marriage, moving in with someone)
• Traffic-related decisions (driving in difficult conditions, choosing transport modes)
• Recreational risks (traveling alone, adventure activities)

This distribution remained surprisingly stable across all data collections, even when comparing responses gathered before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite massive lifestyle disruptions, the types of risky choices people faced did not shift dramatically—suggesting that the fundamental landscape of life’s risks is more stable than expected.

Demographic Patterns in Risky Choices

The study also uncovered several clear age- and gender-related trends.

One example:

• Younger adults often saw quitting a job as their major risky decision.
• Older adults, in contrast, more commonly described the risk of accepting a new job, likely reflecting life-stage differences in priorities, stability, and responsibilities.

These demographic distinctions are important because they offer concrete insight into which groups may need extra support or guidance when navigating uncertain choices.

Why This Study Matters for Researchers

One of the biggest takeaways from the research is that psychological science must occasionally “reset” its assumptions by consulting real life rather than relying solely on established theories. Since many classic decision-making paradigms were developed decades ago, they may no longer reflect the choices people actually struggle with today.

This new inventory provides researchers with:

• A data-backed map of modern risk, grounded in real-world decisions.
• A set of 100 categorized risky choices that can be used to design studies, build new measurement tools, or test predictions about human behavior.
• Insight into how frequently certain risky choices occur and which groups of people experience them most.

The study also serves as a rare example of large-scale, bottom-up discovery work in psychology—an approach the authors argue is crucial for keeping scientific research relevant in a changing world.

Understanding Risk: Additional Background for Readers

To give more context, it helps to look at how psychologists usually categorize risk:

Decisions under risk

These involve situations where outcomes are uncertain but probabilities can be estimated. Examples include:

• Gambling
• Buying insurance
• Choosing between financial investments with known risk levels

Such tasks are common in lab experiments because they can be precisely controlled. But they often fail to reflect the actual complexity of daily life.

Decisions under uncertainty

These involve unknown factors and cannot be assigned probabilities. Examples include:

• Starting a new business
• Changing careers
• Entering a new relationship
• Making major health decisions
• Moving to another country

These choices often feel more emotional and unpredictable because the stakes are high and information is incomplete.

The new study shows that uncertainty-based decisions dominate people’s lived experiences far more than classic “risky gambles.”

Why Occupational Risks Stand Out Today

The overwhelming focus on job-related risks in the study’s findings reflects broader global trends:

• Frequent career shifts are becoming normal.
• Technology is rapidly changing job markets.
• Many industries reward mobility rather than stability.
• People move more often between roles, companies, or countries.
• Job security is less guaranteed than in previous generations.

Because of these pressures, choices like quitting, changing roles, or accepting uncertain opportunities play an outsized role in people’s personal risk landscapes.

What Policymakers and Employers Can Learn

The detailed breakdown of who faces which risks offers practical insights:

• Younger individuals may benefit from clearer guidance when navigating early-career decisions.
• Older workers might need support when contemplating job changes later in life.
• Financial literacy programs, career counseling, and transparent workplace structures can help reduce unnecessary stress around these risky choices.

Understanding these patterns helps ensure that support systems match the actual challenges people face—not assumptions from outdated research models.

A Blueprint for Future Psychological Research

Perhaps the most important contribution of this study is its methodology. By letting people define risk for themselves, the researchers created a model for future studies across psychology:

• Start with real-life data.
• Identify patterns from the ground up.
• Update scientific theories based on how society actually behaves today.

This shift toward discovery-based research could reshape how psychologists study decision-making, uncertainty, and even mental health.

Research Paper:
Mapping the Ecology of Risk: 100 Risky Choices of Modern Life
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09567976251384975