Tattersalls Riders Risk Management Forum 2009

This article quotes directly from the notes taken at the forum. The whole transcript is available on the pages of the Event Riders Association’s new website, under International News, News Stories. It is well worth a read.

Risk Compensation

This counterintuitive idea was introduced in academic circles several years ago and is broadly accepted today. The concept is that humans have an inborn tolerance for risk — meaning that as safety features are added to vehicles and roads, drivers feel less vulnerable and tend to take more chances. The feeling of greater security tempts us to be more reckless. Behavioural scientists call it “risk compensation”.

There has been a lively debate over risk compensation ever since, but today the issue is not whether it exists, but the degree to which it does. The phenomenon has been observed well beyond the highway — in the workplace, on the playing field, at home, in the air. Researchers have found that improved parachute rip cords did not reduce the number of sky-diving accidents; overconfident sky divers hit the silk too late.

Written by Cynthia Wood on 20 April 2006:
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. The kids covered in foam padding are getting just as many bruises, scrapes and sprains as the kids wearing almost none. 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 behaviour 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. In the instance of the mini-ninjas, those with pads are likely hitting and kicking harder and more wildly than those without, and the adults supervising them are likely to be allowing it.

Why would we do such a strange thing? Dr. Gerald Wilde of Queens University in Ontario proposes a hypothesis he calls risk homeostasis. In a nutshell it proposes that human beings have a target level of risk with which they are most comfortable. When a given activity exceeds their comfort level, people will modify their behaviour to reduce their risk until they are comfortable with their level of danger. So far, that‘s not exactly a controversial observation. But risk homeostasis proposes another half to that continuum – according to Dr. Wilde, if a given person‘s level of risk drops too far below their comfort level, they will again modify their behavior. This time though, they will increase their level of risk until they are once again in their target zone.

It seems an odd proposition, but Dr. Wilde and his colleagues have assembled an impressive array of data to support it. For instance, a study of Munich taxicab drivers conducted while the taxicab fleet was being changed over to ABS braking systems. The drivers were tracked by observers unaware of which kind of brakes each cab had. Against the expectations of safety experts who recommend ABS brakes as a safety advance, the drivers with ABS brakes actually had more accidents per vehicle mile than those without. The drivers braked more sharply, made tighter turns, drove at higher speeds, and made a number of other adjustments to their driving, all of which more than compensated for their supposedly safer cabs.

An additional complication for the already beleaguered safety engineers is that risk homeostasis is dependent not upon actual danger, but rather the perception of risk. Much of the gender and age differences in risk-taking behaviour appear to stem less from differing desires for risk, and more from the individual’s different evaluation of risk. Young people, and particularly young men, tend to evaluate their level of risk as much lower than older people would, even in identical situations. This implies that promoting safer behaviour depends more upon altering the perceptions of the target population, rather than improving the safety of the environment – a much trickier proposition.

What it all boils down to is that the law of unintended consequences is extraordinarily applicable when talking about safety innovations. Sometimes things intended to make us safer may not make any improvement at all to our overall safety, and in rare instances they may actually make us less safe. The human tendency to take risks may trump all the efforts of the safety engineers. In the end, no one can save us from ourselves.

Written by William Ecenbarger, April 2009
… Now researchers are positing a risk compensation corollary: humans don’t merely tolerate risk, they seek it; each of us has an innate tolerance level of risk, and in any given situation we will act to reduce — or increase — the perceived risk, depending on that level.

The author and principal proponent of this idea is Gerald J.S. Wilde, professor emeritus of psychology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. In naming his theory “risk homeostasis,” Wilde borrowed the word used for the way we humans, without knowing it, regulate our body temperature and other functions. “People alter their behaviour in response to the implementation of health and safety measures,” Wilde argued in his 1994 book, Target Risk. “But the riskiness of the way they behave will not change, unless those measures are capable of motivating people to alter the amount of risk they are willing to incur.” Or, to make people behave more safely, you have to reset their risk thermostats.

That, he says, can be done by rewarding safe behaviour. He notes that when California promised free driver’s-license renewals for crash-free drivers, accidents went down. When Norway offered insurance refunds to crash-free younger drivers, they had fewer accidents. So did German truck drivers after their employers offered them bonuses for accident-free driving.

Keep in mind some advice offered by Tom Vanderbilt in Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us): “When a situation feels dangerous to you, it’s probably more safe than you know; when a situation feels safe, that is precisely when you should feel on guard.” Those are words even the parachutists, wilderness hikers and investors among us can live by.

From the Forum, Part 7 of Observations & Recommendations: Training of riders to recognise and respect the risk in what they do and in mitigating risk would seem to offer a lot of benefits; achieving a mindset change like this has successful parallels in the industrial world in terms of safety and quality at shop floor level. This type of change in the level of rider awareness of the risks they live with should be planned to extend to recognition that they are responsible for what they ride and how they ride them.

So, what does all that mean for Event Riders?

Perhaps all the talk of, and efforts towards, cross country safety have had the opposite of the intended effect. Perhaps those two ideas should not even be in the same sentence, lest they lull us into a false sense of security, and encourage us subconsciously to raise our desired level of risk.  Are we making some riders more reckless by lowering the perceived risk with our enhanced safety measures: new hats, superior body protectors, frangible pins, softer profiled fences?

At the Tattersalls Meeting, “many riders expressed a view that a return to the trend for simple but perhaps scary upright fences and open parallels would be welcome not least of all on the basis that those fences which were perhaps bigger and more imposing in appearance generated more respect and subliminally satisfied the human risk requirement” and, “it was suggested that more open oxers and uprights in pre and novice classes, whilst it might initially increase the number of fall occurrences statistically, would likely in time contribute greatly to decreasing fatalities and ultimately would tend to decrease fall occurrences as riding standards improved”. So, perhaps we will be seeing a few more good old-fashioned rider-frighteners at the lower levels soon. You have been warned!

Let’s look at the risks, but still appreciate the thrill of the sport.

Face it, however good the rider, however accomplished and scopey the horse, galloping across country at fixed obstacles on an animal which isn’t always bright enough to remember to poo in a different corner from its hay and water, is NEVER going to be a safe proposition. Horses are wonderful animals and hopefully most eventers are superb athletes, but they are not always predictable, however well trained, however experienced.

They act on a mixture of instinct, natural bravery, memory, trust and training. Sometimes you can add fear into that mix, if they’ve been trained that way – and this is like adding gelignite to the pot and hoping for the best. You really, really don’t want to go cross country on a horse that is more scared of you than it is of the jumps.

A great cross country horse loves the game, and accepts your input but also uses his judgement (since even the best riders in the world make mistakes); it’s the horse’s brain and body you’re relying on here. If he’s going cross country like an automaton, he won’t be ready to use his brain and his judgement instantly, and sometimes you’ll need him to.

Even the very best riders and horses in the world can get crossed wires, reactions can be slightly slower than expected, slips and trips can occur, and things can suddenly go irremediably wrong. Fortunately at the lower levels the margin for error is far greater – most horses can clear a Novice fence no matter how bad the approach or take-off. However, statistically the horse is much more likely to get injured (or worse) going cross country than the rider, so we all owe it to our horses to face the risks and counter this bizarre ‘risk homeostasis’ effect. After all, they don’t make body protectors, crash caps and airjackets for horses… yet.

Also, let’s never forget that this is a sport where some of the rider fatalities have been top internationals, very good riders with a lot of experience. It isn’t just a numbers game (they rode more rounds, therefore were statistically more likely to fall). Sometimes it doesn’t only come down to skill, but luck. There, but for the grace of God, or whoever or whatever else you believe in…

Riding cross country is probably the most dangerous thing most of us ever do. We should never underestimate the danger, as well as the magic, of what we do when we trust our lives to our horses and our training, and gallop towards fixed fences…

Compiled and commented on by Kerry Weisselberg