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Risk Taking: A Study in Cognition and Personality. by Nathan Kogan; Michael A. WallachReview by: Ezra StotlandAmerican Journal of Sociology, Vol. 71, No. 5 (Mar., 1966), pp. 588-589Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2774528.

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588 THEAMERICANOURNALOF SOCIOLOGYFollowing a description of the sample, Ginz-berg and Herma first deal with career develop-ment. The data are analyzed in terms of threevectors dealing with (a) career patterns, (b)achievement levels, and (c) the value-choicenexus. The resultants of these vectors, whenbuttressed by considerations of work satisfac-tions and the sociopsychological and environ-mental correlates of work performance, per-mit the authors to offer in the penultimatechapter some tentative statements about therelation between talent and performance.Implications of the research for the optimaldevelopment and guidance of the talented aredetailed in the final chapter, The Conserva-tion of Talent. The questionnaire is ap-

pended.This is an exemplary study, less for whatit tells of the behavior of the talented-though the interested individual gains throughreading it-than in its clear depiction of aresearch enterprise. To label an investigationan exploratory analysis usually serves asan excuse for either the paucity of findingsor methodological imprecision, or both. Thereis no such here. The authors acknowledgethe problems inherent in the investigationthey report, they indicate the connection be-tween their data and the explanatory variablesemergent therefrom, and they recognize thedangers of overgeneralization within thelimited context they essay. The data wereused not to test the validity of the formula-tions and generalizations, but rather to serveas a frame of reference for developing themand pointing directions where interpretationsmight be found (p. 24). Both for the in-formation it presents and the elegance of itssentation, this volume deserves a wideaudience.

LEE BRAUDEUniversity of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Risk Taking: A Study in Cognition and Per-sonality.By NATHANKOGAN nd MICHAELA. WALLACH.New York: Holt, Rinehart &Winston, 1964. Pp. 278. $8.00.This book is the report of a study of indi-vidual differences in risk-taking behavior in

a variety of controlled situations. The authorsdid not approachtheir problemin a hypothesis-

testing manner, but simply posed a series ofquestions which they put to nature in a verythorough manner. Among the questions werethe determinants of the consistency of anindividual's risk-taking tendencies in a varietyof situations; the effects of different types ofpayoff on risk-taking; the relationshipsamong decision strategies, outcomes, and post-decisional satisfaction; the relationship ofrisk-taking to individual differences in cog-nitive-judgmental processes, intellectual abili-ties, and personality.One interesting aspect of their analysis isthat, in addition to computing the correlationsbetween risk-taking and other variables, theycomputed these correlations separately formen and for women, and then separately foreach of the four subgroups formed by split-ting the sample into those high and low inself-reported anxiety and high and low in self-reported defensiveness. The authors are evi-dently quite intrigued by the methodologicalvalue of separate correlations for each of thefour subgroups, which they term a modera-tor analysis. They point out that, often, totalsample correlations may obscure variationsin the size and direction of the correlationsfor subgroups. And, indeed, their results sup-port the authors' contentions in numerousanalyses. For example, they find that a highlydefensive, highly anxious person tends to showa consistent degree of risk-taking in a varietyof settings, while those low on both measuresare more ''realistic.The great trouble with the book, however,is the extraordinary difficulty of reading it.This difficulty results from the rigid mannerin which the authors avoid presenting a theo-retical framework at the beginning of thebook around which the fantastic complexityof the results can be integrated. Instead, theytake the reader through their own experiencesas researchers in examining the results anddrawing conclusions, so that the reader wouldnot obtain the impression that they were do-ing any more than post-hocing. At the be-ginning of the book, the authors should havestated the conclusions that they report atthe end, making it abundantly clear that theseconclusions emerged from the data. The readerwould still be able to accept or reject theconclusions, since the data are fully reported.The idea that a proposition is more or lessvalid depending on whether the researcher

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