Letting The Air Out Of Air Bag Safety

Are the drivers of air bag-equipped cars unsafe at any speed?

Maybe, argue economists at Virginia Commonwealth University. They found that people’s natural desire to drive like lunatics appears to cancel the safety benefits of air bags while boosting the chances that their passengers and other motorists will be rendered roadkill.

“Air bag-equipped cars tend to be driven more aggressively and that aggressiveness appears to offset the effect of the air bag for the driver and increases the risk of death to others,” report economist Steven Peterson of Virginia Commonwealth University and his colleagues in the latest issue of the Journal of Law and Economics.

They studied insurance data collected between 1989 and 1993 on 87 car makes - literally millions of accident claims - as well as 1993 data on fatal car accidents in Virginia that involved late-model cars.

They discovered that “autos newly equipped with an air bag during the 1990 to 1993 model years experienced significant increases in relative losses.” Moreover, they found that the fatality risk in air bag-equipped cars “is not diminished, that the percentage of occupants killed in single-car air bag crashes is unusually high and that drivers of air bag-equipped cars initiate an usually large percentage of such crashes.”

Why are air bags such a bust? It’s not that they don’t work - they do, Peterson said. But people quickly adjust the way they drive in ways that erase the safety gains.

It’s called “offset behavior,” Peterson explained. People like to drive as aggressively as they can, but this tendency is held in check by the level of risk we’re willing to tolerate. If our chances of being injured are reduced, we drive more aggressively (and recklessly) until we’re right back where we started, risk-wise.

“People seem to want to climb higher if they’re using a safer ladder,” Peterson said.

The nose knows

You can pretty much tell the sex of an individual simply by looking at his or her nose, though it’s not the first place that we’d look.

In a recent study conducted at Lancaster University in Great Britain, 40 psychology students were asked to identify the sex of eight men and eight women simply by looking at photos of their nose - the rest of their face and head was covered.

When viewed in profile, the test subjects were able to guess correctly the gender of men 85 percent of the time and women 60 percent of the time.

Were there any other nose clues to tip off test subjects? Absolutely not, reported researchers in the latest issue of the British journal Perception - none wore nose studs, or had prominent nasal hair.

The Unconventional Wiz is relieved to nose that.

The smell of money

Smells sell, say researchers from Drake University and Washington state. They found shoppers said they would frequent scented stores more often and perceive that the goods they sell are of higher quality than in no-smell stores.

We were amazed, said Drake’s Ayn Crowley, a member of the research team. People found the merchandise more up-to-date and the selection more adequate and of significantly higher quality. Probably most important, they said they were more likely to visit a scented store in the future. Likewise, people think they spent less time in a scented store than they actually did, Crowley and her colleagues report in an article to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Marketing.

Crowley said scented stores score with customers because pleasant odors make the environment more interesting, more complicated, a little more inviting to explore, and certainly more pleasant.

She and her colleagues studied the impact of scents on shoppers by setting up a special store on the Washington state campus and inviting students to tour the facility.

The students were told that they were testing a retail concept, and specifically not that they were testing the impact of odors on shopping behavior.

Researchers interviewed the students after they left the store, which featured school supplies and items to decorate apartments and dorm rooms. More than 1,000 students participated in the study.