Risk Tolerance Test: Five Domains, Not One Number

Online test of risk attitude across five separate domains: money, health and safety, recreation, social moves and ethical corner-cutting. There is deliberately no single total. Alongside the statements you work through the Holt-Laury paired lottery list — the standard instrument in experimental economics, which yields an actual risk-aversion coefficient rather than a feeling.

How to take the test

Rate situations across five domains

How likely you are to do each thing. The full version is 29 screens, about 6 minutes; the short one is 11. There are no right answers.

Work through the lottery ladder

Ten rows on one screen: in each you pick the safe or the risky bet. The odds rise as you go down, and somewhere you will switch — that row is the measurement.

Read the profile by domain

Five bars with the spread between your boldest and most cautious domain, a CRRA interval, the say-do gap and a validity read on your own answers.

Find out where you take risks and where you play safe — and what the lottery says

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Features

Five domains apart, and no grand total

The most replicated finding in this literature is that risk taking is domain-specific. The person who leaves a stable job and the person who rides without a helmet are not the same person. One number kept failing to predict anything.

A real coefficient, not a 1-to-10 slider

Ten Holt-Laury paired lotteries (2002): the row where you switch to the risky option pins a CRRA interval from the published table.

Ethical risk is scored on its own

Shading a tax return and jumping off a cliff are not the same courage. A high ethical spike gets its own verdict before anything else is considered.

The balloon is here, and it changes nothing

The famous BART sits after the result as a toy: its ecological validity is contested. A dedicated test requires that any number of pumps leaves every scored figure untouched.

The say-do gap only where it is legitimate

The lottery is compared with the financial domain alone: matching "I ride motorbikes" against a money gamble would be a category error, and the test does not invite it.

A validity block instead of a flattering verdict

Impression management and careless-responding indices are shown, including a switch-back in the lottery list — an incoherent list is noise, not a preference.

What the test gives you

Five risk domains scored apart, with no grand total
The spread between your boldest and most cautious domain — shape matters more than the mean
A CRRA interval from the published Holt-Laury table
A comparison of what you say about money with how you chose in the lottery
An honest label that the balloon is a toy, not a measurement

How the result is built

Each domain is scored separately as a share of its maximum; no overall mean enters the verdict — the archetype comes from the SHAPE of the profile rather than its height, so a flat-high profile and a single-spike profile with the same average get different answers. The lottery maps to a CRRA interval from the published table: four safe choices is risk neutrality, because from row five on the risky option has the higher expected value. The domain percentages and the archetype order are our display convention; the CRRA table and the neutral point come from the paper.

Frequently asked questions

Why is there no overall "how risky am I" score?

Because there is no such thing. Blais and Weber built DOSPERT precisely after one-dimensional risk measures kept failing to predict behaviour: a person can pour money into a startup and still never cross against a light. We show the mean across the five domains as a footnote only and never use it in the verdict.

What is the Holt-Laury lottery?

Ten pairs of bets. In each pair the safe option pays two close amounts and the risky one pays two very different amounts, while the chance of the large payoff rises row by row. Near the top the safe option is better; near the bottom the risky one is. Where exactly you switch depends on how much certainty is worth to you. It has been the standard instrument in experimental economics since 2002.

What does CRRA mean?

Constant relative risk aversion. Zero means indifference to spread at equal expected value, above zero means paying for certainty, below zero means overpaying for the thrill. Your answers pin an interval rather than a point: ten choices do not give more precision than that, and we do not pretend otherwise.

Why does the balloon not count?

The balloon task (BART) is famous, but its ecological validity is contested: there are methodological objections, it elicits unusually risk-averse behaviour, and its personality associations hold mainly in high-arousal variants. So it sits after the result as a toy. This is not just a disclaimer: the test suite contains a check requiring that any number of pumps leaves every scored figure unchanged.

The lottery amounts are not real — does that spoil the measurement?

It affects it, and we say so. Holt and Laury themselves showed that as REAL stakes grow, people become markedly more cautious. Our stakes are hypothetical, so the coefficient describes a choice on paper. Separately: the table is calibrated to the published payoffs, but power utility is scale-invariant, so multiplying every amount by a constant does not move the switch point — that is under test.

I switched back and forth in the lottery list. Is that bad?

It is not a character flaw, but it is not a preference either. The options get strictly more attractive from top to bottom, so switching back cannot be a coherent ranking — it usually means a row was read carelessly. We surface it in the validity block instead of hiding it inside an average.

How long does it take?

The full version is 29 screens, roughly 6 minutes. The short one is 11 screens and about 3 minutes with two items per domain, so the result page marks it as a rougher read. Answers are saved on this device.

Is this a psychological diagnosis?

No. It is a self-knowledge instrument built on published scales, not a clinical assessment and not financial advice. Use it on yourself.

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Who is this tool for?

🎓 Students 🧘 Wellness & Meditation

Published 07 Aug 2026 Updated 20 Aug 2026 Author: The Supreme