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Risk-taking is a long-standing area of inquiry among psychologists and economists. In this paper, we examine the personality profile of risk-takers in two independent samples. Specifically, we examined the association between the Big Five facets and risk-taking propensity across two measures: The Domain-Specific Risk-Taking Scale (DOSPERT) and the General Risk Propensity Scale (GRiPS). At the Big Five domain level, we found that extraversion and agreeableness were the primary predictors of risk-taking. However, facet-level analyses revealed that responsibility, a facet of conscientiousness, explained most of the total variance accounted for by the Big Five in both risk-taking measures. Based on our findings across two samples (n = 764), we find that the personality profile of a risk-taker is extraverted, open to experiences, disagreeable, emotionally stable, and irresponsible. Implications for the risk measurement are discussed.

Individual differences in risk-taking propensity are a long-standing area of inquiry for decision theorists, psychologists, and economists. On the one hand, risk-takers are often synonymous with being reckless and irresponsible (Arnett, 1992; Lejuez et al., 2003). On the other hand, risk-taking tendencies are also used to characterize successful entrepreneurs and investors (Kerr et al., 2019). Despite the strong interest in risk-taking, there is discord amongst the scientific community about the nature of risk-taking as a general personality disposition (Fox & Tannenbaum, 2011; Frey et al., 2017; Hanoch et al., 2006) and its position in the five-factor model (FFM) – the dominant model of personality (Lauriola & Weller, 2018; Mata et al., 2018; McCrae et al., 1999; Paunonen & Jackson, 2000).

Past research has typically conceptualized risk-taking as a domain-specific phenomenon. The domain-specific perspective suggests that risk-taking behavior differs across domains such as finance, health and safety, ethics, recreation, and social (