Personal risk tolerance has sweeping implications for how societies evolve

So true! Who would argue with that? However, crude, primitive Marxism ideology has spoiled this research!

I am not sure I agree with the strong inductive biases of this study that asserts a rather static bifurcation in society between rich and poor. The term "vulnerable communities" is a give away!

Why should not e.g. less affluent individuals without social safety nets take more risk to advance their living standards etc.? The more open and free a society is the more opportunities for e.g. less affluent individuals.

"... a model for how a person’s resources and environment incentivize learning strategies that influence their personal proclivity toward risk. The model, published in Psychological Review, makes predictions that mirror many aspects of modern society, such as how wealth inequality leads vulnerable communities to rely on traditions to manage risk more [???] so than wealthier communities, which can make them slow to adapt when conditions change. This can help explain political polarization and why cautious attitudes persist for generations following shocks like recessions and wars.

“We’re basically linking short time scales — within a person’s lifetime — and generational time scales to gain an overall view of why people vary in their disposition toward risk,” ..."

From the abstract:

"We use cultural evolutionary models to examine how individual experiences and culturally inherited information jointly shape risk-taking behavior under environmental uncertainty.
We find that learning processes not only generate considerable variation in risk beliefs and behaviors, but also that conservative learning strategies—emphasizing the preservation of generational knowledge—excel in high-risk settings, promoting risk avoidance and long-term survival but limiting growth when conditions improve.

In contrast, exploratory learning strategies—leveraging juvenile exploration and peer influence—foster risk tolerant behaviors 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 interclass interactions reinforce these patterns, exacerbating differences in learning strategies and risk-taking behaviors within populations, and perpetuating socioeconomic inequalities [???] through the cultural inertia of excessive risk avoidance.
By uniting developmental, social, and evolutionary perspectives, our framework provides a novel lens on the cultural evolution of risk-taking behavior and its broader societal implications. ..."

Personal risk tolerance has sweeping implications for how societies evolve | Santa Fe Institute

The development of risk behaviors and their cultural transmission. (no public access)