Patient people take more risks

Patient people comparatively take more risks and they are relatively less jealous and less hostile, finds a study unveiled on Wednesday.

Professor Shyamal Chowdhury, of the School of Economics at the University of Sydney, Australia; Matthias Sutter, of Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Bonn; and Klaus F Zimmermann of Maastricht University, UNU-MERIT, CEPR and GLO, conducted the study on "Economic Preferences across Generations and Family Clusters: A Large-Scale Experiment in Developing Country."

Professor Shyamal Chowdhury presented the research data at a programme at the office of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) at Sher-e-Bangla Nagar in the capital on Wednesday afternoon. BIDS organised the programme.

"Husband, wife and children have consistent relationships of character or behaviour for three different dimensions of an individual's economic preferences. Relatively patient people generally take more risks. Families that are significantly more patient take more risks. They are relatively less jealous and hostile," he said.

The study was conducted in Chandpur, Gopalganj, Netrokona and Sunamganj on 542 families including husbands, wives and their children.

Their economic preferences have been collected. Here three dimensions of economic choice are considered: war, risk and social choice. The research was conducted in 2016.

Professor Shyamal Chowdhury said that economic choices like risk, time and social choice play an important role in human life. It has been observed that these choices affect people's educational attainment, labour market, financial pursuit or health.

The authors start with an overview of the economic preferences of parents and children based on data from their experiment. They have found that about two-thirds of parents and children are willing to take some degree of risk, and more than half of the parents and children are inpatient - they prefer to have immediate but smaller rewards as opposed to delayed but larger rewards.

In terms of social preferences, less than 10% of the parents and children are altruistic, less than 10% of the mothers and more than 20% of the fathers are egalitarian, and about 17% of children are egalitarian. In addition, about 20% of parents and children are spiteful, and about one-third of them – both parents and children – are selfish. Taken together, more than half of the children and parents are either selfish or spiteful.

Research has shown that women are more patient than men. Women are on average more self-centred than men. In contrast, men are a little more benevolent and more egalitarian than women.

BIDS Research Director Monzur Hossain said the research has shown that the behaviour of family members and the behaviour of people in society affect the behaviour of children.

"I think the education of teachers also affects the behaviour of children," he added.

Senior Research Fellow at BIDS Dr Kazi Iqbal also spoke at the programme.