Gratuitous Risk: perceived danger and recklessness judgements about outdoor sports participants

We investigate perceived danger and recklessness judgements (N=2060) about risk-taking in different outdoor sports ranging from mundane activities (such as golf and running) to more adventurous or so-called extreme sports activities (mountaineering, ski-touring, surfing). We investigate the relationship between danger and recklessness and the extent to which fatality frequency, as well as other contextual factors such as gender, dependants, experience, professionalism, and motivations of the sports participant affect these judgements across different sporting activities. Our main findings are that, after controlling for fatality frequency, the type of sport pursued has a significant effect on danger and recklessness judgements, and despite a 100-fold increase in fatality frequency we found no significant effect on both danger and recklessness judgements. Moreover, pursuing an extreme sport for charitable purposes significantly reduces perceived recklessness, while having dependants increases it. While we found no evidence of gender bias in such judgements, we found some evidence of a more complex gender effect that involves differences in inter- and intra-gender judgments. Finally, we investigated survey respondents' attitude about additional life insurance cover under variations of the type of sport activity and a 100-fold increase in fatality frequency. Results support prior findings that fatality frequency is much less relevant than the type of activity pursued.

This preprint has been split up into two articles: "Ebert, P. A., & Durbach, I. N. (2023). Expert and lay judgements of danger and recklessness in adventure sports. Journal of Risk Research, 26(2), 133-146. https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2022.2091001" and "Ebert, P. A., Durbach, I., & Field, C. (2024). Gratuitous risk: danger and recklessness perception of adventure sports participants. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/00948705.2024.2335350"