risk-taking

• risktaking

risk-taking (comparative more risk-taking, superlative most risk-taking)

1. Prone to engaging in risky behaviour or unafraid to do things with uncertain outcomes.
   • 2008, Warwick Cairns, How to Live Dangerously: Why We Should All Stop Worrying, and Start Living, Macmillan (2008), →ISBN, unnumbered page:

     We're actually quite a risk-taking species, as species go: and because of that we've managed, in the space of little more than 100,000 years, to go from being a bunch of monkeys (hominids, if you want to be strictly correct about this) somewhere in Africa to more or less total world domination. Not to mention flying to the moon.

   • 2008, John Vernon Pavlik, Media in the Digital Age, Columbia University Press (2008), →ISBN, page 159:

     At a cost of an estimated $9 million, The Hire series consists of short movies (five or six minutes) about a risk-taking professional driver driving a BMW.

   • 2011, Barry Estabrook, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, Andrews McMeel (2011), →ISBN, page 172:

     “We are a risk-taking organization,” Kirk said. “We are doing multimillion-dollar deals. We guarantee loans. We could fail. But my view is that Bob Dylan thing, 'He not busy being born is busy dying.'”

risk-taking (uncountable)

1. The practice or tendency of doing things that are risky or have uncertain outcomes.
   • 2007, David E. Woodward, quoted in I've Got This Friend Who: Advice for Teens and Their Friends on Alcohol, Drugs, Eating Disorders, Risky Behavior, and More (ed. Anna Radev), Hazelden (2007), →ISBN, page 48:

     Unfortunately, these are the types of risks kids and teens are most likely to take, when risk-taking can seem like a cool way to be independent or escape problems.

   • 2009, Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, Free Press (2009), →ISBN, page 363:

     They are similar mainly in the characteristics that brought them together—a positive (or negative) attitude toward schoolwork, in the case of the children in Kindermann's study, or a penchant for risk-taking, in the case of the antisocial gangs.

   • 2010, Jaeyeol Yee, "Risk Governance in a Double Risk Society: From System Failure to Unknown Complexities", in Risk and Public Policy in East Asia (eds. Raymond K. H. Chan, Lillian Lih-Rong Wang, & Mutsuko Takahashi), Ashgate (2010), →ISBN, page 174:

     During the development era, Koreans seem to have ignored the increase of risks and, at times, appear to have considered high-stakes risk-taking as heroic.