Defending Your Life

"Certified son-of-a-gun
Learns life lesson 101.
Don't fly too high on your own supply
Get burned by the sun."

Hey, we have a 'follower' now. (waving to follower)

So I've been doing a lot of thinking about risk-taking. Actually, I've been doing a lot of introspecting and reflecting about my own willingness to take risks. (Let's face it - thinking in the abstract is all fine and good, but at some point you need to take stock of yourself and match the theory to the reality.)

It's easy to tout romanticized notions about risk-taking and courage, and people like to think they know how they would act in a given situation. I subscribe pretty heavily to the theory that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, so I look to my own past behavior in an attempt to identify what factors are more likely to enable/encourage me to take risks.

For example, the sky-diving story... If you are thinking of doing something that other people might look down upon (especially if it fails), it is eminently easier to decide to do this thing if you can convince someone else to do it with you. Yes, my decision to jump out of a perfectly good airplane was made easier by the fact that I was able to convince my new friend to do it with me. Perhaps this says something about my need for validation, or perhaps it just says that I thought the experience would be worth more if it were shared. ('We just jumped out of an effin' plane! How badass are we!' doesn't work when you substitute 'I' for 'we'. Nobody wants to hear it.)

Despite the fact that New Friend bailed on the skydiving trip at the last minute, I persisted in recruiting her for similar adventures. And she persisted in bailing at the last minute. After the mid-winter, too effin' cold, hip-deep snow, camping mis-adventure, I gave up on her. And though I had gone ahead and done these things without her, they never meant as much to me as other adventures I had shared with other friends.

So what is it about having a co-conspirator that increases one's willingness to engage in risky behavior? (Once New Friend had proved to be an unreliable co-conspirator, I ceased to engage in adventures of this magnitude.) Individual risk-exposure doesn't change with the presence of a co-conspirator. (My likelihood of crashing into the ground when my parachute doesn't open is no different when I go by myself than when my friend agrees to jump as well.) This leads me to suspect (in my case anyway) that the potential social costs of engaging in risk-seeking behaviors were at least as important as the potential physical costs. You can only stray so far from the herd before you are no longer a member of the herd. If you take a few of them with you though, you can start a new herd. ;)

As far as I've been able to observe directly (in myself and others), having a co-conspirator does increase one's willingness to engage in risky behavior. That statement almost has the 'well, duh!' quality that one would expect of a well-known fact. Yet I'm struggling to come up with a name of a theory that adequately explains why this should be so. Is it a function of choice-validation and having support when called upon to defend your decision? Is it a function of mitigated social costs - would we all engage in riskier behaviors if there was less social cost associated with them?

There must be an academic study or theory somewhere that adequately addresses this issue, but my google-fu appears to be inadequate for the task of finding it. So the take-home message today is simply this - I'm more likely to jump if you are jumping with me.