Risk and uncertainty are critical to human decision-making. Yet our understanding of the underlying traits that present the foundation of decision-making remains limited. The work develops a causal model of the antecedents of consumers’ purchase behavior in the context of unit-linked life insurance products. Our experimental approach (n = 929) builds on the risk as analysis and risk as feeling perspective, which entails huge theoretical and practical contributions. Risk avoidance and uncertainty avoidance are identified to strongly influence the product perceptions. We complement our findings by investigating the conditions that favor the influence of both traits by investigating moderating effects.