Do Anxious People Take Fewer Risks? A Meta‐Analysis of the Relationship Between Trait Anxiety and Dispositional Risk Taking

ABSTRACT The present study was a meta‐analysis of previous studies on the correlation between trait anxiety and dispositional risk taking. Although it is often claimed that people who are generally anxious (i.e., higher in trait anxiety) have a strong tendency to avoid taking risks across a variety of situations (i.e., are lower in dispositional risk taking), the mean correlation across 80 effect sizes representing over 8000 unique participants was only −0.07, with a very high level of unexplained heterogeneity. An analysis focusing only on the relatively large subset of studies using the State–Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI‐T) as the measure of anxiety and the Balloon Analog Risk Task (BART) as the measure of dispositional risk taking revealed a mean correlation that was essentially zero. The only statistically significant moderator was the proportion of female participants in the study, with larger proportions associated with stronger negative correlations. However, the analysis also revealed several other moderators that should be studied in future research. Specifically, the correlation may be stronger or more consistently negative when the anxiety measure is something other than the STAI‐T, when the risk‐taking measure is a self‐report risk propensity measure, and when the risk‐taking measure precedes the anxiety measure. These results have important implications for the definition and measurement of both trait anxiety and risk taking and for theories about how they are related.