Case Study #3: Type T Personalities
Part 1: Read the following case study.
FIVE. . .FOUR . . .THREE. . .TWO. . .ONE. . .SEE YA!” And Chance McGuire, 25, is airborne off a 650-ft. concrete dam in Northern California. In one second he falls 16 ft., in two seconds 63 ft., and after three seconds and 137 ft. he is flying at 65 m.p.h. He prays that his parachute will open facing away from the dam, that his canopy won’t collapse, that his toggles will be handy and that no ill wind will slam him back into the cold concrete. The chute snaps open, the sound ricocheting through the gorge like a gunshot, and McGuire is soaring, carving S turns into the air, swooping over a winding creek. When he lands, he is a speck on a path along the creek. He hurriedly packs his chute and then, clearly audible above the rushing water, lets out a war whoop that rises past those mortals still perched on the dam, past the commuters puttering by on the roadway, past even the hawks who circle the ravine. It is a cry of defiance, thanks and victory; he has survived another BASE jump.

McGuire is a practitioner of what he calls the king of all extreme sports. BASE—an acronym for building, antenna, span (bridge) and earth (cliffs)—jumping has one of the sporting world’s highest fatality rates: in its 18-year history, 46 participants have been killed. Yet the sport has never been more popular, with more than a thousand jumpers in the U.S. and more seeking to get into it every day.

It is an activity without margin for error. If your chute malfunctions, don’t bother reaching for a reserve—there isn’t time. There are no second chances.

Still, the sport’s stark metaphor—a human leaving safety behind to leap into the void—may be a perfect fit with our times. As extreme a risk taker as McGuire seems, we may all have more in common with him than we know or care to admit. Heading into the millennium, America has embarked on a national orgy of thrill seeking and risk taking. The rise of adventure and extreme sports like BASE jumping, snowboarding, ice climbing, skateboarding and paragliding is merely the most vivid manifestation of this new national behavior. Investors once content to buy stocks and hold them quit their day jobs to become day traders, making volatile careers of risk taking. In ways many of us take for granted, we engage in risks our parents would have shunned and our grandparents would have dismissed as just plain stupid.

A full 30% of this year’s Harvard Business School graduates are joining venture-capital or high-tech firms, up from 12% just four years ago. “The extended period of prosperity has encouraged people to behave in ways they didn’t behave in other times—the way people spend money, change jobs, the quit rate, day trading, and people really thinking they know more about the market than anyone else,” says Peter Bernstein, an economic consultant and author of the best-selling Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk. “It takes a particular kind of environment for all these things to happen.” That environment—unprecedented prosperity and almost a decade without a major ground war—may be what causes Americans to express some inveterate need to take risks.

There is a certain logic to it: at the end of a decade of American triumphalism abroad and prosperity at home, we could be seeking to upsize our personalities, our sense of ourselves. Perhaps we as a people are acting out our success as a nation, in a manner unfelt since the postwar era.

The rising popularity of extreme sports bespeaks an eagerness on the part of millions of Americans to participate in activities closer to the metaphorical edge, where danger, skill and fear combine to give weekend warriors and professional athletes alike a sense of pushing out personal boundaries. According to American Sports Data Inc., a consulting firm, participation in so-called extreme sports is way up. Snowboarding has grown 113% in five years and now boasts nearly 5.5 million participants. Mountain biking, skateboarding, scuba diving, you name the adventure sport—the growth curves reveal a nation that loves to play with danger. Contrast that with activities like baseball, touch football and aerobics, all of which have been in steady decline throughout the 90’s.

The pursuits that are becoming more popular have one thing in common: the perception that they are somehow more challenging than a game of touch football. “Every human being with two legs, two arms is going to wonder how fast, how strong, how enduring he or she is,” says Eric Perlman, a mountaineer and filmmaker specializing in extreme sports. “We are designed to experiment or die.”

And to get hurt. More Americans than ever are injuring themselves while pushing their personal limits. In 1997 the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission reported that 48,000 Americans were admitted to hospital emergency rooms with skateboarding- related injuries. That’s 33% more than the previous year. Snowboarding E.R. visits were up 31%; mountain climbing up 20%. By every statistical measure available, Americans are participating in and injuring themselves through adventure sports at an unprecedented rate.

Consider Mike Carr, an environmental engineer and paraglider pilot from Denver who last year survived a bad landing that smashed 10 ribs and collapsed his lung. Paraglider pilots use feathery nylon wings to take off from mountaintops and float on thermal wind currents—a completely unpredictable ride. Carr also mountain bikes and climbs rock faces. He walked away from a 1,500-ft. fall in Peru in 1988. After his recovery, he returned to paragliding. “This has taken over many of our lives,” he explains. “You float like a bird out there. You can go as high as 18,000 ft. and go for 200 miles. That’s magic.”

America has always been defined by risk; it may be our predominant national characteristic. It’s a country founded by risk takers fed up with the English Crown and expanded by pioneers—a word that seems utterly American. Our heritage throws up heroes—Lewis and Clark, Thomas Edison, Frederick Douglass, Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Ford, Amelia Earhart—who bucked the odds, taking perilous chances.

Previous generations didn’t need to seek out risk; it showed up uninvited and regularly: global wars, childbirth complications, diseases and pandemics from the flu to polio, dangerous products and even the omnipresent cold war threat of mutually assured destruction. “I just don’t think extreme sports would have been popular in a ground-war era,” says Dan Cady, professor of popular culture at California State University at Fullerton. “Coming back from a war and getting onto a skateboard would not seem so extreme.”

But for recent generations, many of those traditional risks have been reduced by science, government or legions of personal injury lawyers, leaving boomers and Generation X and Y to face less real risk. Life expectancy has increased. Violent crime is down. You are 57% less likely to die of heart disease than your parents; smallpox, measles and polio have virtually been eradicated.

Combat survivors speak of the terror and the excitement of playing in a death match. Are we somehow incomplete as people if we do not taste that terror and excitement on the brink? “People are [taking risks] because everyday risk is minimized and people want to be challenged,” says Joy Marr, 43, an adventure racer who was the only woman member of a five-person team that finished the 1998 Raid Gauloises, the granddaddy of all adventure races. This is a sport that requires several days of nonstop slogging, climbing, rappelling, rafting and surviving through some of the roughest terrain in the world. Says fellow adventure racer and former Army Ranger Jonathon Senk, 35: “Our society is so surgically sterile. It’s almost like our socialization just desensitizes us. Every time I’m out doing this I’m searching my soul. It’s the Lewis and Clark gene, to venture out, to find what your limitations are.

Psychologist Frank Farley of Temple University believes that taking conscious risk involves overcoming our instincts. He points out that no other animal intentionally puts itself in peril. “The human race is particularly risk taking compared with other species,” he says. He describes risk takers as the Type T personality, and the U.S. as a Type T nation, as opposed to what Farley considers more risk-averse nations like Japan. He breaks it down further, into Type T physical (extreme athletes) and Type T intellectual (Albert Einstein, Galileo). He warns there is also Type T negative, that is, those who are drawn to delinquency, crime, experimentation with drugs, unprotected sex and a whole litany of destructive behaviors.

All these Type T’s are related, and perhaps even different aspects of the same character trait. There is, says Farley, a direct link between Einstein and base jumper Chance McGuire. They are different manifestations of the thrill-seeking component of our characters: Einstein was thrilled by his mental life, and McGuire—well, Chance jumps off buildings…

The question is, How much is enough? Without some expression of risk, we may never know our limits and therefore who we are as individuals. “If you don’t assume a certain amount of risk,” says paraglider pilot Wade Ellet, 51, “you’re missing a certain amount of life.” And it is by taking risks that we may flirt with greatness. “We create technologies, we make new discoveries, but in order to do that, we have to push beyond the set of rules that are governing us at that time,” says psychologist Farley.

Part 2: Answer the following questions about the case study. Please type your responses (double-spaced, 12-point font). Be sure to support your answers with specific research evidence from the readings and lecture.

Why has the popularity of extreme sports increased in recent years?

The increased popularity of extreme sports may result from a need for danger and risk and the lack of risk in our everyday lives. 

Do risk-takers share common personality characteristics? If so, which ones?

They all find pleasure in the thrill of what society sees as risky behavior. Whether that be thinking differently (Einstein) or acting differently (McGuire).

Why do humans take intentional risks when other animals do not?

Because humans have the ability to be creative and make new things everyday while other animals do not. Humans find pleasure in being so unique.

How does Frank Farley characterize the Type T personality?

He sees risk takers as Type T personalities.

Is the Type T personality compatible with stage theory approaches to personality development? To trait theory approaches? Be sure to explain your answers.

Well, stage theory says development is the series of age-related changes that happen over the course of a life span. Trait theory is interested in the measurement of traits, which can be defined as habitual patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion. By saying someone is a Type T personality you are classifying them by what they are at the moment and not by the age-related stages they have gone through in their lives. I believe it is more compatible to trait theory approaches because they are measuring people based on their risky behavior.

Are personality characteristics stable across the lifespan? What do you think Chance McGuire was like as an infant? What will he be like as an older adult?

Some characteristics are stable but new ones are formed when the person and environment interact. Life events influence personality development and deepen genetically determined characteristics, and these characteristics in turn influence the life events the individual is likely to experience. I think that as an infant McGuire’s temperament was more risky and creative and I believe that will carry on into late adulthood.

Is the environment the primary determinant of personality characteristics? Design an experiment that would help you answer whether environment is the primary determinant of risk taking. Would you be able to conduct this experiment? Why or why not?

Farley’s hypothesis supports the view that personality traits are environmentally determined. The genetics of Americans is extremely diverse, which would make it unlikely for someone to inherit the need to risk taking. Farley’s position is that culture influences the development of personality. To conduct an experiment one could use the stage theory approach because it investigates the series of age-related changes that happen over the course of a life span.

Frank Farley has proposed that Americans tend to be risk takers, while the Japanese tend to be risk adverse. Assuming this is true, how would you explain these cross-cultural differences?

American people and Japanese people live in different environments therefore risky behavior may not appeal to them as much as it does to Americans. Also, America is based on the idea of risk, that could be one big reason why it is more appealing to Americans.