Relationships among religiosity, risk tolerance, gender, and health risk behaviors: Evidence from a national dataset

Understanding what causes people to behave in ways that put their health at risk is a necessary first step in designing effective programs to encourage healthy behavior. However, there is still much that is unknown about the causal relationships between personal characteristics and risky behaviors.

In particular the literature has demonstrated that risk preferences, religiosity, and gender are all strongly correlated with risky behaviors including smoking and drinking. In separate research, a correlation between religiosity and risk preferences has also been established: more risk averse people are also more religious. If risk aversion causes a person to be more religious it is possible that the observed effects of religion on risky behaviors simply come from the effects of risk aversion; causality could also operate in the opposite direction. Past research has also established a gender effect: women are both more risk averse and more religious than men.

Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which has measures of both risk preferences and religiosity, I attempt to disentangle the effects of risk preferences, religiosity and gender on individuals' decisions to smoke, drink, and fail to have health insurance. I show that even though risk preferences, religiosity, and gender are highly correlated, they each have independent, strong correlations with those risky behaviors; for instance, even controlling for the other two factors, the most risk tolerant people are 7.9 percentage points more likely to drink than the least risk tolerant people, while people at the 90th percentile of the religiosity distribution are 19 percentage points less likely to drink than the people at the 10th percentile.

These results show that risk preferences, religiosity, and gender each have powerful and independent correlations with risky behaviors. In addition, they show that even though women are more religious and more risk averse, controlling for religiosity and risk preferences does not change the estimated impact of gender on behavior. This implies that there is another difference between men and women that accounts for their different behaviors, and understanding this gender difference could provide insight into what causes people to engage in health risk behaviors.