For the behavioral sciences, our results bear on an ongoing debate about the extent to which risk tolerance is a “domain-general” as opposed to a “domain-specific” trait. Low phenotypic correlations in risk tolerance across decision-making domains have been interpreted as supporting the domain-specific view23,24. Across the risky behaviors we study, we found that the genetic correlations were considerably higher than the phenotypic correlations (even after the latter are corrected for measurement error) and that many lead SNPs are shared across our phenotypes. These observations suggest that the low phenotypic correlations across domains are due to environmental factors that dilute the effects of a genetically-influenced domain-general factor of risk tolerance.
