Beauty Queens and Battling Knights
Beauty Queens and Battling Knights: Risk Taking and Attractiveness in Chess is the name of a new study done by Anna Dreber, Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gränsmark for IZA. IZA is a private, independent economic research institute. Established in 1998, the Bonn-based think tank focuses on the analysis of global labor market developments.
Introduction: Risk preferences are typically studied from situations in which individuals make decisions in isolation. In many instances, however, one individual’s risk taking has consequences on the outcome of another individual, as in the case of competitions where decisions involve risk. To what extent characteristics of one individual affect risk taking by another individual is relatively unexplored. In particular, little is known about the role of physical traits on risk taking. In this paper we focus on attractiveness. In practice, it can be hard to get reliable data on outcomes regarding risk and attractiveness. Options as well as outcomes are not always easily defined when decisions are made outside of the laboratory, and as Eckel and Wilson discuss, physical appearance could be used as a heuristic when people try to form an opinion about an unfamiliar individual’s ability and characteristics. It can therefore be a challenge to disentangle attractiveness from for example beliefs about ability.
We argue that the data used in this paper enables us to disentangle the specific effect of attractiveness on risk taking, by allowing us to study relevant outcome variables while controlling for aspects such as ability. Such information is publicly available, which means that the subjects studied in this study do not have to use attractiveness as a proxy for another individual’s ability.The goal of this paper is to explore the role of attractiveness in chess, by linking it to risk taking. In particular, we examine whether people use riskier strategies against attractive people, whether this affects performance, and whether men and women react to attractiveness in the same way. In order to test this, we use a large international panel dataset on chess tournaments which includes controls for the players’ age, gender, nationality, risk taking/aggressiveness and playing strength, measured by cumulative performance. We use photos of some of these chess players and have them rated according to attractiveness by participants recruited through an online labor market. To increase the reliability of our findings, we use two independent measures of risk taking. The fact that they lead to very similar findings strengthens the results substantially.
Our results suggest that male chess players choose significantly riskier strategies the more attractive the female opponent they are playing against. Women, however, do not react to the attractiveness of their opponents. Moreover, riskier play against an attractive female opponent has no positive impact on performance, which implies that economic rationality is unlikely to be the reason for the increased risk taking against attractive female opponents. Finally, we find some weak indications of more attractive players of both sexes choosing more risky strategies than less attractive players.
The chess data set, which contains information on international chess games performed by expert chess players, enables us to analyze strategic interactions between people with substantial experience in the task. These objective and observational data are combined with survey responses for 626 chess players who were subjectively rated for physical attractiveness. Each photo received about 50 independent ratings. Approximately half of the chess players of whom we have photos were women.
Using the same chess data as in this study, Gerdes and Gränsmark found that men use riskier strategies than women, and that this gap is especially large when men play against women. Part of our goal in this study is to further our understanding of the cause of these effects, that might also occur in other domains than chess. That men take more risk than women in general is a well-documented finding , but as far as we know, the relationship between attractiveness and risk taking has not been studied before.
The contribution of this paper is thus two-fold. First, we contribute to the literature on the determinants of risk taking. Besides having the playing strength of both players, as well as demographic characteristics, the data allow us to include a measure of the stake of each game played. The tournaments are an environment which is highly competitive thus a priori we don’t expect people to change their behavior due to characteristics of their opponents which are not relevant for the game. Thus we believe that the effect size of attractiveness on the behavior of male players provide us with a lower bound of how attractiveness affects male risk taking in general.
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