Risk Tolerance Test — Career, Money and Social Risk

Your appetite for three different kinds of downside, measured separately: career risk (unproven roles, leaving something secure), financial risk (volatile income, investing, borrowing against a possibility) and social risk (saying the unpopular thing, being visible, spending relationship capital). The combination of the three levels lands you on one of eight profiles.

Because a single risk score would be wrong about most people. The main finding in this literature — Weber, Blais and Betz, 2002 — is that risk-taking is domain-specific: the same person is routinely bold about their career and careful with their money, and the correlations between domains are modest. A one-number answer would average away the very thing worth knowing.

No, and we are not affiliated with its authors. DOSPERT is the published domain-specific scale and its items are not ours to reproduce; all 18 statements here are written by us. We also use three domains rather than DOSPERT's five, and one of ours — career — is not a DOSPERT domain at all. The finding is credited; the questionnaire is our own.

Neither is better. Appetite for risk is not courage and caution is not cowardice — both are ways of pricing an unknown, and which one pays depends entirely on the situation and on what you can afford to lose. The eight profiles are shapes, not a ranking, and none of them is the answer the test is hoping for.

No. This is an educational self-reflection test. It does not recommend an investment, a job move or any other action, a high level on any scale is not a suggestion to act on it, and nothing here is investment, legal or career advice. Decisions with real money or a real job in them deserve a qualified professional and your own numbers.

Yes, and usually for concrete reasons rather than a change of character: a mortgage, a child, a redundancy, a windfall, a bad year. Risk tolerance is a fairly stable trait, but what you can afford to lose is not, and the two are easy to confuse. Retaking this after a big change is one of the more interesting things you can do with it.

The work-mode test describes how you operate day to day — your rhythm, your focus, how you get things done. This one describes what you're willing to put on the line to begin with. They pair well: the same working style plays out very differently depending on whether the person running it bets or hedges.

On purpose: half the items are worded so that agreeing with them means caution, not appetite. It is the standard defence against answering on autopilot — with all items pointing the same way, agreeing with everything would hand out the boldest profile in the set without the test learning anything about you.