Risk Compensation

Here's a really interesting article on risk compensation.

Story:
Let's suppose your child wants to take a martial arts class. Being a conscientious parent, you check out the local dojos and find two good places. Both are suitable and well equipped. Both practice fighting with contact – but there's one major difference. One dojo insists on a full range of protective padding – hands, feet, chest protectors, shin guards – the whole works. The other takes a much lighter approach - hands and feet, and sometimes not even those.

To the conscientious parent, the first place is going to look much safer, right? But when you look at the injury rates of the two dojos, you notice something odd: They're about the same. What could be going on here?

What's happening is a process known as risk compensation. It's a tendency in humans to increase risky behavior proportionately as safeguards are introduced, and it's very common. So common, in fact, as to render predictions of how well any given piece of safety equipment will work almost useless.

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