The Roots of Caution

Last month, I ran this pair of Twitter polls.  I was quite surprised by the asymmetric responses.

Few participants think that objective risk is the leading cause of caution.  This makes sense to me; high profile cases aside, I don’t see the elderly being especially cautious, or the young being especially reckless.  (Though admittedly, it’s pretty hard to see anyone these days).  But when they want to explain low caution, they’re pretty evenly divided between the other explanations.  When they w...