The Development of Risk Attitudes and their Cultural Transmission

We use cultural evolutionary models to examine how individual experiences and culturally-inherited information jointly shape risk attitudes under environmental uncertainty. We find that learning processes not only generate plausible variation in risk attitudes, but also that conservative learning strategies---emphasizing the preservation of generational knowledge---excel in high-risk environments, promoting stable wealth accumulation and long-term survival but limiting asset growth as conditions improve. In contrast, exploratory learning strategies---leveraging risk-free juvenile exploration and peer influence---foster risk-tolerant attitudes that thrive in affluent, low-risk settings where wealth buffers and social safety nets reduce the costs of miscalculations. Introducing economic stratification to the model reveals how wealth disparities and inter-class interactions reinforce these patterns, exacerbating differences in learning strategies and risk-taking behaviors, and perpetuating socioeconomic inequalities through the cultural inertia of excessive risk aversion. By uniting developmental, social, and evolutionary perspectives, our framework provides a novel lens on the cultural evolution of risk attitudes and their broader societal implications.