Every day people are faced with hundreds of choices: stairs or elevator; ride or walk; cook or order.
Although most decisions are not life-changing, for some people certain choices are considered riskier.
Researchers in Switzerland have cataloged 100 of the most common real-life dilemmas people face, such as changing jobs, getting married or buying a house, providing a framework for understanding the sources of modern anxiety.
Renato Frey, co-author of the study and a psychologist at the University of Zurich, said: “Our main goal was to try to extract people's real experiences in real life… And then in a relatively simple way, we simply asked study participants to report one risky choice.”
Topping the list is moving to a new job and leaving your current job. with a professional elections making up five of the top 25 risks. Meanwhile, risky health choices made up eight of the top 25.
The specific health decisions people reported were often very important and personal. These include decisions such as whether to undergo major surgery, follow doctor's recommendations for treatment, exposure to 5G, or vaccination.
Health risks also included important lifestyle choices, such as starting a new diet or exercise plan or participating in hazardous sports, highlighting that these personal decisions carry significant potential for both benefit and harm.
Additionally, the study found that the weight of these health risks and related Anxiety changes throughout a person's life. For older people, and especially women over 60, risky health-related choices have become as common as work-related choices.
The health risks people mentioned were both deeply personal and high stakes, including classic medical decisions such as surgery, as well as modern controversies such as vaccination or the rollout of 5G (stock image)
The new study involved more than 4,000 Swiss adults of different ages, so further research is needed to determine the riskiest choices Americans make across different categories.
The researchers deliberately avoided defining “risky choices” to capture two different types of real-world decisions: decisions with known but uncertain outcomes, such as gambling, and decisions with completely unknown consequences, such as starting a new business.
To identify the real risks that concern people, researchers surveyed 4,380 people aged 15 to 79 years.
They asked each participant to describe one difficult and risky choice they had personally faced or seen others struggle with.
The researchers asked people to recall a time when they either took a risk or avoided it from their own point of view or from the point of view of another person they knew.
The survey generated thousands of personal dilemmas, ranging from “Should I quit my job?” to “Should I have this surgery?”
Using a multi-step process, the researchers systematically grouped similar responses to create a final, data-driven list of the 100 most common risky choices.
The researchers visualized the most common risks using word clouds. The largest and most prominent words were dilemmas such as “change jobs,” “quit jobs,” and “invest money,” while less frequent risks appeared in smaller text around them.
The best answers were relatively consistent across the study population, but the researchers found some differences when they focused on specific groups.
People's age and gender significantly influenced which risks they considered most significant.
Researchers have compiled a list of the “Top 25” most common life dilemmas that people face. They calculated the average age of people who mentioned each risk and identified the major life area (such as work, health, or money) to which each risk related.
The researchers created word clouds with the six most frequently mentioned risky options.
Career dilemma: “Should I quit my job?” has become less common with age for both men and women, and the question “Should I take a new job?” remains a major problem among young people.
Men aged 60 and older were often concerned about the possible health effects of using 5G, while men aged 30 to 44 were concerned about having surgery and thinking about traveling. These options did not make the top five most common choices for women.
Women aged 15 to 29 and 45 to 59 often wondered whether to pursue specific education or training, while women aged 30 to 44 faced the dilemma of whether to get married. These two options did not make the top five most common choices for men.
Survey participants also expressed concerns about the use of new technologies, including 5G, as a health risk. The study does not specify which of the newly developed technologies they are most concerned about, but could relate to the use of AI in medicine, genetic testing or wearable health devices.
Work-related dilemmas were the most common source of risk, accounting for almost a third (32 percent) of all reported choices. Health (18 percent) and financial (17 percent) issues follow, while social (13 percent), traffic (12 percent) and recreation (nine percent) issues round out the top difficult decisions people face.
The study also found that the idea that some people are “risk takers” and others are “risk averse” in their thoughts and behavior may not be true.
The results showed that a person's willingness to take risks can change dramatically depending on the category of the decision.
For example, a daredevil may regularly skydive, which is a recreational risk, but still remain very conservative and careful about their health, such as not taking medications.
The study compared risk perception in three groups: a pre-infection baseline (lightest bar), a new cross-sectional group during the pandemic (medium) and a longitudinal group (darkest) tracked from pre-Covid to pre-Covid. The data strongly suggests that the distribution of risk across categories has remained fundamentally stable throughout the pandemic.
A person's general tolerance for risk was a weak predictor of their actual choices, proving that someone who is adventurous in one area of life can be very conservative in another.
The researchers also tested whether a major global crisis, the Covid pandemic, fundamentally changed the types of risky choices people face. They found that this was not the case.
The overall list of the top 100 life dilemmas remains virtually the same.
The researchers identified several limitations of their study. The most limiting factor was that those in the study were from Switzerland, “a very safe country, for example with a very low crime rate.”
The country also has a completely different payment infrastructure for medical services.
Health insurance is compulsory for everyone in Switzerland, with a strong emphasis on universal coverage through regulated private insurance companies.
Although monthly insurance premiums are a significant expense for households, the system has a safety net.
All out-of-pocket expenses during the year are limited by law, meaning that a serious illness can put a big dent in the family budget, but it is unlikely to lead to financial ruin.
Meanwhile, in the US, people face the highest health care costs in the world. The US lacks Switzerland's universal mandate and strict limits on paying its own expenses.
Consequently, medical bills are the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the US, a phenomenon that is virtually non-existent in Switzerland.
The study was published in the journal Psychological Science.
