This short paper considers various ways of viewing 'risk compensation', which, the author considers, should be called 'safety compensation'. In his view, safety compensation as a personality trait corresponds to the hypothetical concept of 'accepted risk'. Safety compensation as an attitude corresponds to an individual's whole relationship to the current situation, which is determined by its perception, interpretation and emotional experience. Safety compensation as a behaviour corresponds to the behaviour resulting from a situation-specific interaction between subjective safety and objective safety. People, unlike animals, tend to have forgotten that successful behaviour in dangerous situations is based mainly on clearly distinguishing perceptions about the situation. Thus they tend to compensate for this by using cognitive functions. For the covering abstract see IRRD 870346.
Samenvatting