Talk:Risk compensation

message: I removed this chunk from the article because the data is disputed. 
See the unresolved discussions on the same data at Talk:Seat belt legislation/Archives/2023/November#British statistics anomolies.  -- de Facto (talk). 18:11, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Seat belt statistics 

message: The article begins by defining risk compensation as a phenomenon studied in ethology, but the bulk of the article concerns risk compensation in relation to traffic safety. Both are clearly worthy subjects as well as obviously related to each other, but perhaps they should have their own articles? At least there should be more on risk compensation in animals.--Rallette 08:57, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ethology and traffic safety 

message: I read that proponents and opponents of contraception were arguing about condom efficiency the field of AIDS prevention in terms of risk compensation. One noted critic on the issue is Edward C. Green, who argues that since people are willing take on more risk, they may disproportionally erase the benefits of condom use. This area of debate could be featured within the article along with precise references on the subject.  ADM (talk) 20:48, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Risk compensation, condoms and AIDS

message: Financial institutions made many risky loans and investments in the years leading up to the near collapse of the global economy in 2008. Borrowers who could not afford to repay loans often had little to lose and risk. Risk compensation came in the form of huge public taxpayer bailouts of irresponsible lenders who had predicted such protections.
--Mark Kaepplein (talk) 10:47, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't believe that the phenomenon you are describing here is risk compensation. Surely it is more about situations where one person makes a gain but another person takes the loss when it all goes wrong leading to risky decisions and failuers? I assume this is a separate name in academic writing and may possibly have its own article on WP and be worth linking too from this article. PeterEastern (talk) 19:23, 31 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Indeed. I think you may be looking for Moral hazard. Richard Keatinge (talk) 21:37, 31 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Of course. Thanks. I have now added a reference to moral hazard in the lead. PeterEastern (talk) 15:10, 1 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Financial Crash of 2008 

message: *Is the 'Peltzman effect' just another name for the same effect? If so, then I suggest we add a brief reference to Sam Peltzman in the lead and remove the para. PeterEastern (talk) 06:33, 27 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Integration of new content 

message: I would like to propose that we resurrect the risk homeostasis page as it is not the same as risk compensation. Can we please start a dialogue about this?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Annettejswilde (talk • contribs) 18:55, 30 December 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: The two were merged about 16 months ago - see discussion above.  I agree that Risk Compensation and Risk Homeostasis are not synonymous and that the comments in the discussion above stating that they are synonymous were misguided.  However, I do think that Risk Homeostasis is a sub-topic of Risk Compensation and should be mentioned in this article.  I don't have strong feelings about whether it should have its own article - good arguments could be made either way.  Let's hear them.  Mr. Swordfish (talk) 21:21, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

text: Personally I would prefer to see both Risk Homeostasis and Peltzman effect being properly integrated into this article - currently they are placed as isolated sections in at the end where few people will spot them and are not even mentioned in the lead. I think that would be much more useful to the general reader than splitting them out again. PeterEastern (talk) 09:19, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Very happy to discuss it, however I am increasingly of a view that these should be covered in a single comprehensive article. I have done a lot of work today on the citations to get the article up to higher general standard and feel that it could be a very good article indeed with a bit more work. PeterEastern (talk) 15:25, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that risk homeostasis is not the same as Risk compensation - it might be described as a stronger form of risk compensation with additional sub-hypotheses - but I do suggest that, for an encyclopedic audience, they are best presented as part of one article. Richard Keatinge (talk) 00:50, 2 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Risk compensation is not Risk Homeostasis 

message: Sorry to be persistent, but the first paragraph in the speed limits section was misleading and biased. There is evidence too that speed limit changes are ineffective - this was not mention. Rather than re-hash the whole argument in this article, let's defer to the speed limit article where it is rightly discussed in detail. LatchWits (talk) 23:37, 4 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: You're advocating for a WP:POVFORK. You can't designate Article A for pro-A arguments and Article B for anti-A arguments. Every article must be neutral, not just the sum of several articles. That doesn't mean all debates about speed limits belong here, but it must be stated clearly that these small numbers of counterintuitive studies that support raising speed limits to lower accident rates are overwhelmed by the vast majority of studies which tell us, quite simply, that speed kills.<P>Similarly, you can't just have a hatnote saying, "go read this other article to see the citations". That's citing Wikipedia as a source, violating WP:CIRCULAR. Any assertion made on this page requires a citation here on this page, not in some other Wikipedia article.--Dennis Bratland (talk) 23:45, 4 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: This article is dedicated to risk compensation, why complicate and confuse it with unrelated content? There is not a clear consensus amongst evidence-based studies that a change of unenforced speed limits has a corresponding effect on traffic speeds, why try to give the impression that there is? There is however, a consensus that reduced speeds tend to result in a reduced accident and casualty rates - but that is, of course, entirely independent of the prevailing speed limit. LatchWits (talk) 23:55, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

text: *I have tried to clarify the distinction between traffic speeds, posted speed limits, and speed limit enforcement and the role of controlling traffic speeds in reducing road casualties in a short opening para - I hope we can agree on something like that. I would strongly advise against us opening up the full-blown folk of the 'are speed limits effective argument' here, this has been covered in exhaustive detail in the speed limits article in the past! We should simple reflect the consensus view from that article. I have removed the citation to the old 1992 research, if we need anything, lets use the World Bank report referenced from the lead of the speed limits article.  PeterEastern (talk) 08:02, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I whole-heartedly agree, and with the minor tweaks I've made, I think the current paragraph is sufficient introduction. LatchWits (talk) 11:28, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Happy with you adjustments. Thanks. PeterEastern (talk) 15:59, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

text: *I think it would be very valuable for us to read and integrate more from Vrolix (2006) - already cited - as there is a lot of very relevant material relating to road safety which is not covered appropriately in this article, including a whole section of cruise control; also on the issue of risk displacement and moral hazard which we don't mention other than as an entry in 'see also'. PeterEastern (talk) 09:09, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: The point, with respect to speed limits specifically, that needs to be clearly brought out is that drivers adapt their behaviour (including choice of speed), based on perceived risk (including the perceived risk of being caught breaking any speed limit) and hence a speed limit sign, in isolation, does not have much impact on perceived risk, other than the weight given by their internal moral compass to the act of breaking the law and the weight given by the speed limit sign to their perceived likelihood of causing an accident because they are exceeding that limit. Vrolix may help with this. LatchWits (talk) 11:41, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed, and as far as I can see from a quick skim of Vrolix the whole subject of road safety and risk compensation is more complex than this article currently conveys. I don't think what we have a wrong or bad, it just isn't definitive and top grade yet. I will see what I can do, but I am pretty busy and it would be great if others could get involved with reviewing the literature and adding content as well! PeterEastern (talk) 15:59, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Speed limits 

message: There has been a recent flurry of edits to this page, and overall I think they have improved the article.  But I also agree with Peter that "there is a lot of very relevant material... which is not covered appropriately in this article". In the spirit of improvement, here's my take on the main shortcomings of the article in its present state:
The idea of Risk Compensation has been around since at least the 1930's but didn't attract much in the way of serious study until the 1970's.  In 1975, Sam Peltzman published "The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation" (http://www.jstor.org/stable/1830396) where he stated that "... offsets (due to risk compensation) are virtually complete, so that regulation has not decreased highway deaths."  According to Peltzman, regulation was at best useless and even counter-productive. This was an extraordinary claim and like a man-bites-dog story it attracted a lot of attention. 
About a decade later, Gerald Wilde introduced the theory of Risk Homeostasis, which proposed that humans seek to maintain a constant level of risk, i.e. risk is adjusted homeostatically much like body temperature.  This was another extraordinary man-bites-dog story and attracted a lot of attention in the popular press.
Reading the literature published in the 30 to 40 years hence, my view is that the extreme claims of Wilde and Peltzman are not in the mainstream or representative of the field as a whole.  The recent literature is much less outre - a dog-bites-man story or more aptly, a dog-barks-at-man story. Consequently, it has not attracted the kind of attention in the popular press that Peltzman and Homeostasis has.  I think the current article over-emphasizes these two extraordinary claims and might give the reader the wrong impression. In particular, Peltzman and Wilde's assertion that risk compensation is complete ( i.e. that it totally negates the benefits of safety measures) has not been supported by empirical studies or widely accepted by the mainstream. I don't think there is anything factually incorrect in the article right now, just that except for the examples section there's little in the article that goes beyond Wilde and Peltzman.
So, I propose we expand the Overview to represent the current mainstream expert opinion, and seek to place Peltzman's paper and Wilde's theory in the proper historical context. This requires work, so it may not happen immediately. I think the sub-sections on the Peltzman Effect and Risk Homeostasis are fine as they are, they just need a better framework.  Of course, there are a bunch of CN tags that need to be resolved in the Peltzman Effect section.
I agree that Vrolix (https://doclib.uhasselt.be/dspace/bitstream/1942/4002/1/behavioraladaptation.pdf) is an excellent RS to base the expansion on.  In addition, the first four chapters of Rudin-Brown & Jameson (http://books.google.com/books?id=F8HfuHnFbCMC) and Hedlund's article (http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/6/2/82.long) provide the kind of literature survey that is the gold standard for wikipedia reliable sources.
A second, much more minor quibble is the recently added name-dropping.  "Hedlund claimed X, Williams said Y, Carson noted Z" presupposes that our readers know who Hedlund, Williams, and Carson are and I don't think we can assume that.  This form of writing is fine for journals where the readership is expected to know (or take the time to find out) whom is being cited, but for a general interest article it's overkill - having the name in the cite is sufficient for wikipedia.
-- Mr. Swordfish (talk) 21:21, 7 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with your analysis completely. Re Williams and Carson, I named them because I was quoting them in order to get the point across that others in the sector though that Wilde was going well over the top. However, I don't however know these people, have no reason to believe that they are worth naming and agree that they should probably not be named unless they are notable as individuals to the story in which case we need to take the time to introduce them properly. Peltman and Wilde are clearly central characters in the story and should be named and introduced - possibly in a new history section? Are you able to have a go at some of this? I think it would be really good to get more energy from more sources building this article. PeterEastern (talk) 05:00, 8 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Support your analysis Mr swordfish and Peter Eastern, go for it. I might suggest John Adams (geographer) as another central figure in this story and one who is more definitively part of mainstream thought. Richard Keatinge (talk) 08:24, 8 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recent improvements and suggestions for further improvement 

message: This article seems to have been vandalized yesterday, Feb 22. I'm showing in the history that a bot tried to correct it, but refreshing the page is still showing the vandalized content for me. I did not find an option to confirm the bot's work, and it doesn't seem to have gone through, so I'm bringing it to y'alls more experienced hands here.  98.209.228.228 (talk) 04:15, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: It was fixed. You need to force a page reload with F5 or CTRL+F5 or Command+R. If that doesn't work, empty your cache. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 04:29, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Those steps are not working for me, but the problem is likely on my end. Thanks for the clarification. 98.209.228.228 (talk) 16:57, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Vandalism

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thread_title:  External links modified