The hypothesis was bandied about but never rigorously tested. In the 1940s, as experts debated safety measures to reduce the soaring number of traffic accidents, some were concerned that designing safer roads or cars would merely cause riskier driving. How individuals change their behavior in response to perceived risk has been of interest to psychologists, safety regulators, and economists for decades. And it’s going to come for us again, and again, in the future. Yet a closer look reveals there’s a reason why this zombie idea won’t die: It’s baked into the culture of institutional medicine and American political thought. It might be tempting to dismiss any single deployment of risk compensation language by medical authorities as an unfortunate messaging misstep. And when risk compensation does play a part in behavior, it tends to do so in small and specific ways-hardly cause for the alarm and fervor with which it is often applied, especially during the pandemic. This paradoxical idea has been trotted out by health experts to caution against not just pandemic safety measures such as masks, but everything from child-safety caps on medication (which, the worry goes, could lead parents to leave pill bottles lying around carelessly) to diet soda (what if people chug the stuff and it makes the obesity epidemic worse?).īut whenever risk compensation has been subjected to empirical scrutiny, the results are usually ambiguous, or the hypothesis fails spectacularly. Guardrails aren’t helpful they’re counterproductive. Under this reasoning, a road with guardrails would cause more accidents than a road without guardrails. But some proponents of the idea make a stronger claim: that guardrails cause so much reckless driving that any potential safety benefits of guardrails are offset or even reversed. If you’re driving on a precarious cliff-side road without guardrails, you’d probably drive more cautiously.
Risk compensation makes intuitive sense and can be true to an extent. The concept many medical experts can’t seem to loosen their grip on is known as “risk compensation.” It’s an idea that comes from the study of road safety and posits that people adjust their behavior in response to perceived risk: the safer you feel, the more risks you’ll take. Throughout the pandemic, each time a public safety measure arrives on the scene, some experts fret that the masses will simply use the newfound sense of security as license to behave recklessly, canceling out or even reversing any benefits of the safety measure. There’s a reason why this zombie idea won’t die: It’s baked into the culture of institutional medicine.
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