Serious Science - serious-science... Neuropsychologist Barbara Sahakian on risky decision-making, two forms of cognition that people use, and the entrepreneurs’ way of thinking
Don't mean to sound rude, just curious. How do you know that the tendency towards more risky behaviour in entrepreneurs (compared to on average 30 year older managers) was not/is not actually just a function of age? I mean, it is quite common to see anecdotally that younger people on average seem to be more risk taking than their older peers. Have you found and studied older entrepreneurs and younger managers (despite the rarity of those two two groups) and shown that these groups do not share the same patterns of neural activation of their 'same age, different behaviour' counterparts?
I just wonder because it does make sense that older individuals who are now managers may have simply lost that pattern of neural activation found in entrepreneurs through, for instance, pruning mechanisms that removed/weakened the neural connections responsible for that pathway, given that it wouldn't have been strengthened through repeated use. In the case of a manager, the frequency of risk-taking behaviour is going to be far lower compared to their entrepreneurial counterparts.
