O001n March 16th New Paltz welcomed guest speaker Cordelia Fine on her talk in the Cognitive Science Colloquium Series titled “The myth of the Lehman Sisters? Sex, testosterone, and financial risk-taking.” In her presentation she outlined common reasoning as to why men are typically more susceptible to higher risk taking behaviors or decision making. Traditional views asserted the difference in risk taking between male and females was due to levels of testosterone. From this stance, men are genetically more competitive for social status, material resources, sexual opportunities and the acquired defense of offspring. Females are more constrained as far as biological reproduction processes are concerned, and therefore have lower reproductive variance and less s003elective pressure for risk taking. While these were the common assumptions in the past, Fine’s recent research and data collection suggests that there is not a significant difference between men and women in their risk taking strategies, and this may be because experiments that failed in their original hypothesis were buried. Fine went against this trend as she presented her opposing arguments. While men are conceived to be more financially risk taking, women are more socially risk taking. Counter- intuitively, one sex effect may be compensating for another. Her presentation raised many questions and provided a fresh perspective to her audience.