For example, half were asked if they agreed:

"People shouldn't drive in highly populated areas where other people have to breathe the car fumes"

and half got:

"People shouldn't smoke in highly populated areas where other people have to breathe the cigarette fumes"

4/14

(We originally considered specific v general questions, e.g.,

"People driving cars in public places should be liable for any harm..."

"People operating machinery in public places should be liable..."

but decided that changing the context was neater and less subjective) 5/14

Here's the full set of answers. As you can see, responses could change dramatically when driving was mentioned. All except Question 2 were hugely statistically different.

This doesn't make sense! The principle is the same in both forms of each question; only context changes 6/14

Is this self-interest? Cognitive dissonance? Most people drive, so it might make sense they'd make excuses.

But no. We separated out the subset of people who didn't themselves drive and they basically responded the same as the drivers, also making special pleading for cars 8/

We end with a call for policymakers to recognise their unconscious and institutional biases and to implement mechanisms to overcome them in planning and health decisions.

You can read the full paper here for free https://psyarxiv.com/egnmj

Thanks for reading! 14/14

@ianwalker

Hi. Thanks for sharing, interesting!

Having only read the summary and looked at your thread I do wonder how you took in account people not only perceiving different risks but risks actually being on a different level or coming from a different source. Ci and Cii for example appear very different to me as the deciding agent (private choice for various reasons vs work where there's always dependency) is not always the same.

@hembrow @ianwalker

As a Dutch person who lived in the UK (Wales) I suspect most people are aware of their own anti-cycling/walking bias but not their own pro-car bias.

I wonder how this is in the Netherlands though: my theory is that a much lower percentage has a anti-cycling/walking bias but a similar portion has the pro-car bias.*

Is either of you aware of research on this?

*leading to things where at stations there's free car parking and (good) paid bike parking and no-one bats an eye