In my book on teaching English Language Learners, I describe what researchers have determined to be the key qualities of a good language learner.

One of them is the willingness to take risks.

A new study has just found:

“….that lower cognitive ability is associated with greater risk aversion, and more pronounced impatience. These relationships are significant, and robust to controlling for personal characteristics, educational attainment, income, and measures of credit constraints. We perform a series of additional robustness checks, which help rule out other possible confounds.”

I’m not too crazy about the use of the phrase “lower cognitive ability” because it seems to indicate that it might not be possible to improve it. But, nevertheless, I think the study’s results are intriguing.