Married CEOs and fund managers take less risks than single ones.
Sex and CEOs
Sexual selection – the competition for mates – lies at the heart of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. All things being equal – which they never are, of course – any behavior or attribute which makes an individual more attractive to breeding partners should end up being selected for because the unsuccessful individuals in the mating game leave no offspring.
Given the biological imperative to pass on their genes you'd expect people to be fairly aggressive in trying to do so. The evidence suggests that humans, like other species, tend to become risk-takers when confronted with the need to acquire a partner, particularly one of higher status. All of which leads to the slightly odd conclusion that, if you want your money handled as safely as possible, you should look for married managers in stable relationships. Or women.
Risks and Rewards
The original idea behind natural selection was about competition for scarce resources. Food is the obvious resource – but accessing sources of food only keeps you alive, it doesn't guarantee you'll manage to pass on your genes. Hence Darwin added the concept of sexual selection, the idea of a competition, mainly amongst men, for access to mates. Sexual selection has been used to explain various animal kingdom oddities like the extravagance of the peacock's tail and the ridiculous nests of the bower birds: the males are trying to impress prospective partners (see: Advertising on the Handicap Principle).
Michael Baker and Jon Maner in Risk-taking as a Situationally Sensitive Male Mating Strategy suggest that risk-taking is a valuable strategy for males attempting to signal their reproductive fitness: "Among men, risky behaviors have potential for displaying to potential mates characteristics such as social dominance, confidence, ambition, skill and mental acuity, all of which are highly desired by women seeking a romantic partner ... Because male risk-taking is thought to be derived ultimately from intrasexual competition over potential mating opportunities, we predict that interest in procuring a mate will be associated with increased risk-taking among men". Their evidence supports this prediction. For those of us inclined to behavioral explanations of most things it's a neat twist that the experiment uses priming to induce the effect: male participants primed with pictures of attractive female faces were more likely to…
