The term risky shift was coined by James Stoner in 1961. To examine group decision making, he asked participants to make decisions about real-life scenarios that involved some amount of risk. Participants first gave their own individual ratings.

What is risky shift theory?

What is the “Risky Shift”? This phenomenon was first discovered as part of a master’s thesis by Stoner in 1961 and refers to the tendency for decisions made in groups to be less conservative than the decision of the average group member (Shaw, 1976).

When first studied Stoner 1961 it appears that groups make riskier decisions than would the individual members it is now known that?

This view was challenged in a series of experiments by Stoner (1961), which identified what became to be known as the “risky shift” : when faced with the same decision problem, individuals within a group make riskier decisions, compared with the actions they would take outside the group.