Originally Posted by
grantelmwood
Thank you, but it's best to ignore all self-appointed forum cops who can't simply keep quiet and let people discuss things. This is a case for using the ignore feature on the forum. This way, you filter out distracting posts that interrupt the actual news link discussion at hand.
That's fine, let's actually discuss it.
Here's the actual study: /www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369847823001018
This is a forced choice survey with a non-random, non-blinded sample that produces a result that is essentially meaningless. If you look at the photographs that are being compared, if I were a subject, I'd really have no idea what the question being asked (paraphrased in the article as
select the image they thought looked less human) actually means, only that I have to make a choice in a few seconds. The photos are of people in T-shirts standing next to a flat bar bike, wearing or not wearing helmets and/or yellow reflective vests. They got a couple of these combinations to score somewhat lower than chance on the "humanness" scale, but so what? Here are some of the pictures:
In preparation for this, they were shown this "insectoid scale" to indicate what more or less human looked like:
Strikes me that the obvious flaw is that they're really asking whether a bare head or a ball cap looks less like an insect shell than a helmet does and doing a similar comparison between an ugly as hell vest and a natural fiber T shirt.
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The sample, BTW, is people who clicked on a link on Facebook, with the title of the survey explicitly stating what was being tested. So much for controlling for bias.
But let's just ignore how weak this design is and assume they're right. What are you supposed to do with that information? I have no idea how much a slight decrease in my humanness affects my risk, but I suspect it's not by much at all and, I have no idea why I wouldn't assume that that risk increase wouldn't likely be outweighed by the increase in risk I'd get from stopping my helmet use.