What makes some children more likely than others to dart across
the street in traffic? According to a study in the December
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied (Vol. 9, No. 4),
it's whether they are risk-takers. In the study, lead author
Ulrich Hoffrage, PhD, a research scientist at the Max Planck
Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and colleagues tested
22 boys and 22 girls who were 5 to 6 years old. The researchers
first placed each child on the curb of a busy one-way street in
Munich where there was no traffic light or crosswalk. They then
asked the children to indicate when they thought it was safe to
cross the street. As the researchers expected, some children
were more likely than others to say they'd cross the street at
potentially dangerous times. To find out why some children seem
to be traffic daredevils, Hoffrage and colleagues played a
gambling game with the children. An experimenter presented each
child with 10 wooden boxes, nine of which contained coveted
stickers; the tenth box w