In life, risk taking is inevitable, but we each gravitate toward that level of risk we are willing to tolerate. That’s what the science–and our experience–shows. Scientists refer to this self-regulatory process as risk homeostasis. It’s not an expression you hear often, but it’s an important idea.

It’s a phenomenon that has not been fully accounted for in safety design and legislation. The problem is that when people tend to gravitate towards a set level of perceived risk, they negate much of the benefit of any safety improvements.

For example, I was reading about the introduction of anti-lock brakes, and some of the original testing done on them. As a technology, they work. But interestingly, when they were introduced, the accident rate went up rather than down – at least for a while. In a controlled study, the German Ministry of Transport found that taxi drivers who knew they had anti-lock brakes drove more aggressively. Eventually the accident rate returned to normal, but not to a lower level.

It seems that people will drive more aggressively if they feel that they can due to better brakes, thus arriving at the roughly the same risk level. This happened with “child proof” caps on drugs too. With the “safer” tops, people were suddenly more inclined to leave prescription drugs out more, where they were more accessible to children. This possibly negated any safety gains from the better caps, since some kids could figure them out now that they had access.

That is your short introduction to risk homeostasis and what it says about risk taking and safety improvements. Now here are a few questions to think about:

In what other areas of life can we see this phenomenon? (Think of homeostasis in general.)

How do we overcome this tendency towards “risk homeostasis” in order to make safety improvement that actually make people safer?

Instead of our risk taking being based on a level of comfort, could we train ourselves to act according to a more rational evaluation of risk in relation to reward?

Feel free to add your thoughts on this below.