Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART)
Decision MakingParticipants pump up virtual balloons for points, stopping to collect before the balloon pops — a widely-used behavioural measure of risk-taking that correlates with real-world risk behaviour.
The Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART; Lejuez et al., 2002) is one of the most widely used laboratory measures of risk-taking. Participants see a series of 30 balloons presented one at a time. On each balloon they can pump it up as many times as they like — each pump earns a fixed number of points and inflates the balloon on screen. At any point they may press Collect to bank those points. However, each balloon has a hidden explosion point drawn from a uniform distribution (1 to 128 pumps in the canonical version). If the balloon is pumped past its explosion point, it pops and the participant loses all points earned on that balloon.
The BART captures the subjective trade-off between reward accumulation and loss risk in a dynamic, repeated-choice setting. Unlike hypothetical lottery tasks, the outcomes are immediate and consequential within the session, making risk behaviour observable trial by trial.
The primary dependent variable is the Adjusted Average Number of Pumps (AANP): the mean number of pumps on non-exploded balloons. This adjustment removes the ceiling effect of explosions — an exploded balloon cannot contribute pumps beyond its explosion threshold, which would systematically underestimate risk-taking in high-risk individuals. Higher AANP indicates greater risk-taking.
The BART shows good convergent validity with self-report measures of sensation seeking, impulsivity, and risk preference, and predictive validity for substance use, gambling, and other risky real-world behaviours (Lejuez et al., 2002; Skeel et al., 2007; Lauriola et al., 2014).
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