The Deadly Effect Of Overprotection
Sun Herald
Sunday February 6, 2005
FROM the US comes a new piece of research that confirms some very old wisdom. Economists from Harvard and Columbia universities have discovered that drivers with third-party, "no fault" car insurance tend to be more reckless than uninsured drivers.
Like here, the "no fault" provision means that a driver's insurance company pays for any damage he or she inflicts. Third-party insurance is not yet compulsory in all American states, so it's still possible to find significant numbers of uninsured drivers to compare with their insured counterparts. That comparison is startling: according to a report in The Atlantic Monthly, "relaxation of liability is correlated with a 10 per cent increase in traffic deaths".In other words, uninsured drivers tend to drive more carefully, which makes sense, since they know they will have to pay for any damage they inflict on others. For every 1 per cent decrease in the number of uninsured drivers, the number of fatalities increases by two per cent, leading the researchers to conclude that no-fault, third-party insurance is actually a "moral hazard".That reminds me of a famous piece of research into the effects of advanced driver training in Sweden, which pointed to a similar "moral hazard". Drivers who had been taught how to master the art of driving on ice tended to have more accidents than those who had not received training. Overconfidence was the problem: drivers with the extra skills apparently took more risks because they thought they were better and "safer" drivers.The mind works in funny ways when it comes to accepting responsibility for our actions. The more we feel that someone else is looking after us via safety devices, insurance, or even by rules and regulations the less we feel the need to look after ourselves and, correspondingly, the more likely we are to land ourselves in trouble. Perhaps we don't actually say to ourselves, "It doesn't matter if I trip on this rough bit of path I can always sue the council", but there must be some half-conscious process a bit like that. Once we've mentally shifted the responsibility for our actions to someone else either someone we can blame or someone who will pick up the pieces for us we are less inclined to act as if we are fully responsible for our own actions. Parents know this. The least effective way of trying to teach a child to accept responsibility for its own behaviour is to be overprotective. Similarly, you don't teach a child to become more morally sensitive by creating a complex set of rules and regulations. All that happens is that the child either becomes a loophole specialist, or looks at the list of prohibited activities and decides that anything not on the list must be OK. Obedience is a very different thing from responsibility.The "moral hazard" uncovered by those US researchers finds echoes here. In a spectacular declaration of her unwillingness to accept personal responsibility for her shopping habits, a respondent in one of my research projects called for the banning of any products likely to be damaging to the environment. Another spoke of the difficulty of working out what's right and wrong: "I'd like someone to tell me."At a time when we seem prepared to accept more draconian regulations to replace personal responsibility more mandatory sentencing, more censorship of the media, more stringent controls over the marketing of food and confectionery, more curtailment of civil liberties in the name of "the war on terror" the risk is that we'll produce the opposite outcome from the one we're hoping for. It seems to be a law of human nature: the more "protected" we feel, the more careless we are likely to become.Send your ethical dilemma to moralmaze@fairfax.com.au
© 2005 Sun Herald