Buzz Inside the Minds of Thrill-Seekers

6. College professor


7. College student


8. Accountant


9. Civil service – clerical


10. Librarian

The investigators then compared the air traffic controllers

with a group of college students and also people who work for the

government. These air traffic controllers worked at Level IV facil-

ities, the kinds of airports that handle over 300,000 flights per year.

Being an air traffic controller means potentially putting many

people in jeopardy in a rather stressful environment. What the

researchers found was what you might suspect: The air traffic con-

trollers outscored both groups across the board in sensation-

seeking. So rather than kick back a break after a long,

stressful day, it turns out most air traffic controllers are likely to

prefer to seek out highly stimulating activities to wind down. This

would lead one to believe that risk-taking professions and high

sensation-seeking correlated. Case closed. Or is it?

The story actually isn’t nearly as simple as that. Take pilots

for example. Another study done in the 1970s showed that naval

preflight students scored higher in thrill- and adventure-seeking

butlowerin experience-seeking, disinhibition, and boredom sus-

ceptibility than the college students.^2 On the face of it, this doesn’t

seem to make sense. You’d imagine that test pilots would score

much higher in sensation-seeking than a college student. Even the

authors suggested that the discrepancy between these results and

the intuitive answer (that pilots would blow college kids out of the

water on sensation-seeking) may have been due to “a social desir-

ability response set” (research psychologist lingo for “the college

kids wanted to sound cool” so they inflated their sensation-seeking

scores). While this could be the case, when you think about it, it

actually makes some sense that pilots would seek thrill and adven-

ture but not necessarily score high in the other areas of the sensa-

tion-seeking assessment. Many test pilots are military personnel –

the type of people who aren’t likely to be disinhibited (that doesn’t

go over well with commanding officers). They also have to spend

long hours in classes, in training, and in the air, performing highly

technical movements under pressure over and over again, so if they

didn’t get bored easily or act impulsively this would be a major plus.

And since they are likely to be following a relatively regimented

118 / Buzz!

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