Although our focus has been on the genetics of general risk tolerance and risky behaviors, environmental and demographic factors account for a substantial share of these phenotypes’ variation. We observe sizeable effects of sex and age on general risk tolerance in the UKB data (Supplementary Fig. 4), and life experiences have been shown to affect both measured risk tolerance and risky behaviors (e.g., refs.41,42). The GWAS results we have generated will allow researchers to construct and use polygenic scores of general risk tolerance to measure how environmental, demographic, and genetic factors interact with one another.
