Peltzman effect
Another name for Risk compensation
Another name for risk compensation, often used for safety rules and regulations: when a law makes an activity safer, people may act less carefully and cancel out some of the gain. It is named after economist Sam Peltzman.
Peltzman's original claim that car-safety rules saved no lives overall has been widely challenged, and later studies find that measures such as seat-belt laws do reduce deaths.
In everyday life
After a town adds guardrails to a winding road, some drivers start taking the curves faster than before.
Once your company starts backing up every file automatically each hour, you and your coworkers stop saving copies of important work and delete drafts far more casually.
Why your mind does this
To act at all, we need some belief that our choices matter and that we can pull them off. A bit of extra confidence gets us moving, keeps us going after setbacks, and protects our sense of self-worth and our standing in a group.
Its family, in 30 seconds: Confidence to act
How to spot it
Ask whether a new rule that protects you has quietly changed how carefully you act.
What you can do
When a new safety rule arrives, track the actual results over time, in addition to whether people follow the rule.
Same family: Confidence to act
- Overconfidence effect
- Social desirability bias
- Third-person effect
- False consensus effect
- Hard-easy effect
- Lake Wobegon effect
- Dunning-Kruger effect
- Egocentric bias
- Optimism bias
- Forer effect
- Barnum effect
- Self-serving bias
- Actor-observer bias
- Illusion of control
- Illusory superiority
- Fundamental attribution error
- Defensive attribution hypothesis
- Trait ascription bias
- Effort justification
- Risk compensation
- Peltzman effect
SourcesPeltzman (1975)·Wikipedia