Our results provide insights into biological mechanisms that influence general risk tolerance. Our bioinformatics analyses point to the role of gene expression in brain regions that have been identified by neuroscientific studies on decision-making, notably the prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, and midbrain, thereby providing convergent evidence with that from neuroscience38,39. Yet our analyses failed to find evidence for the main biological pathways that had been previously hypothesized to influence risk tolerance. Instead, our analyses implicate genes involved in glutamatergic and GABAergic neurotransmission, which were heretofore not generally believed to play a noteworthy role in risk tolerance.
