and collect the money or keep going to maybe get more money.
The test measures your risk tolerance or risk aversion. Risk was
defined as the number of pumps. High scores indicated high
risk-taking and pumping the balloon as much as possible.
People who are risk averse cash out much sooner.
The researchers then asked the nurses to describe any
potentially risky or unsafe actions they have done and to explain
whether their potentially risky behavior was a result of lack of
training and feedback, a lack of proper equipment, or simply
a lack of time.
So what happens when risk-prone, high sensation-seekers’
gambles don’t pay off? Well they tend to blame the environment.
When it comes to the workplace, high sensation-seekers who are
tempted by risky decisions blame their unsafe behavior on lack of
time or support. So, while sensation-seeking may help people tol-
erate the chaos of working as a first responder, when combined
with a risk-taking personality, it may be more likely they’ll take
risks in procedures and then blame others when things don’t work
out like they hoped.
After my conversation with Dr. Shayne, I started to wonder
whether ornot I had been wrong, not necessarilyabout ER personnel
but about my whole understanding of the relationship between high
sensation-seeking and the workplace. I had thought that perhaps
there was a certain type of job environment where the high sensa-
tion-seeking personality would excel. That didn’tseem to bethe case.
Looking back over my notes from my interview with
Hannah, I realized she was hinting at some of the same ideas that
came out of my conversation with Dr. Shayne. “You can’t really tell
just by someone’s personality, I don’t think, but you can tell how
they act in a stressful situation. If they just jump right in and say,
‘What can I do,’ and...they might not know exactly what to do, but
they’re willing to do it and they don’t freeze up, then you know
they’re going to be okay.”
Certainly there is an HSS element in that kind of response.
But there are many other things too. The HSS/career equation
started to seem like it wasn’t quite as linear as I wanted it to be.One Small Step
When I was in Sudbury, Ontario, at Science North, preparing for
a panel on which I was the psychologist discussing thrill-seeking,125 / All in a Day’s WorkDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:18:48, subject to the Cambridge