How much do we like to take risk?

 In general, we are relatively risk aversive that we love stale lifestyles including style incomes, stable relationships and etc. However, sometimes we may tend to compare ourselves with others, especially those who seem to live better than us, then we may feel unsatisfied about our current situations and would like to shift our lifestyles to others which seem better. Moreover, resources are flowing within our community, we are not living in a completely planned community that everyone gets their equal share of resources. When people surrounding us are receiving higher and higher incomes and living in better lifestyles, our current lifestyle may still satisfy our needs but we start to fear that others may take some of our resources away and we become worse and worse and others become better and better. Such insecurity makes people feel their current stable lifestyles are only temporary, so the stability that people want breaks down. When people re-enter instability, they have to make risky decisions to get back their stable lifestyle, and the better lifestyle they want, the riskier actions they tend to take. Therefore, when we see that the society or the economy is being restructured, we tend to take risky actions. Moreover, when we are poorer, we tend to take more aggressive (riskier) actions. Poorer people tend to spend more money on lotteries than richer people do. Rich people do not like lotteries not because it is too risky, it is because there are many more profitable opportunities that are less risky and deliver higher expected returns. For poor people, they have too little to lose, so they are more willing to take risk.

Overall, when experiencing unstable or unsatisfied lifestyles, people tend to take riskier actions.