Victims of John Deere, Kubota, or Cub Cadet garden tractor accidents should contact riding mower attorney John Gehlhausen for a consultation to discuss filing an injury claim.
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Riding mower and garden tractor rollover accidents have serious consequences for the victim and his or her loved ones. Although safety equipment is on the market to protect consumers in the event of a rollover accident on some mowers, many mowers and lawn tractors aren't equipped with these safety systems. John Gehlhausen discusses the reasons that consumers don't purchase rollover protective systems when they are offered as optional equipment in the following article.
OPTIMISTIC BIAS
Or, Why Riding Mower Buyers Do Not Buy Optional Roll Over Protection Safety Frame Systems (ROPS)
By: John Gehlhausen
Riding Mower Accident Product Liability Attorney
Manufacturers desire to manufacture lawn tractors as inexpensively as possible; it helps their profits. To achieve this low cost, manufacturers sometimes avoid installing necessary safety features such as a Rollover Protective System (ROPS). When inevitably a consumer is killed or permanently injured because of a lawn tractor rollover and litigation ultimately ensues, an increasingly popular tactic of riding mower manufacturers is to blame the buyer.
Simple. A riding mower (lawn tractor) safety frame system, also known as a Rollover Protective System (ROPS), consists of a roll-bar and a seat belt. Some manufacturers offer them as optional equipment. If the buyer does not elect to purchase the ROPS option and the machine rolls over and kills or permanently injures its operator, the manufacturer will throw up its hands in mock horror and exclaim:
“We are surprised that the buyer did not buy the ROPS that we (or one of our competitors) offered. Therefore, it is not our fault that the lawn tractor did not have a ROPS on it. A ROPS would have probably protected the operator.”
The litigation theme of the manufacturers is clear: it is all the fault of the buyer. Implicit in their responsibility-shifting is the view that design safety is the responsibility of the buyer, not the producer.
It is not. Safety frame systems for tractors were first offered as optional equipment in Sweden in 1954 but did not sell in any appreciable numbers until 1959, when Sweden passed a law making them mandatory on new tractors.
The fact is simple: there is no documented place or time where ROPS have been marketed as optional equipment for any kind of tractor that they have sold in appreciable numbers when compared to the overall number of tractors sold for which they were designed–ever! The sale of optional ROPS relative to the overall sale of the lawn tractors for which the optional ROPS are designed remains extremely small. This is true even though some manufacturers require that the buyer sign a ROPS waiver form acknowledging that ROPS will protect the operator in the event of rollover. The manufacturers know that even with a ROPS waiver, the optional ROPS is not likely to be purchased. They are taking advantage of what is known as the “optimistic bias.”
Dr. Dale Griffin of the University of British Columbia School of Business has addressed buyers’ reluctance to purchase optional ROPS. Dr. Griffin has a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University. He teaches marketing and consumer behavior. Dr. Griffin has written extensively on what is known in the psychological field as “optimistic bias.”
“Optimistic bias” is a well recognized set of psychological tendencies of people to underestimate negative outcomes and overestimate the probability of positive outcomes in predicting the future. You will recognize these tendencies.
The first psychological tendency is what is called comparative optimism. For risks which are difficult to estimate, we often compare ourselves to others to determine how much to worry about a particular hazard and how many precautions we really should take. In this regard it is well known that with many risks most people estimate that they are at less risk than their peers. This is particularly true when the risk, such us lawn tractor rollovers, are believed to be highly controllable, easy to imagine, absent from one’s personal experience, and for which it is easy to stereotype the operator involved in the accident as someone who was not paying attention to his or her environment.
The second psychological tendency is called the illusion of control. This is the tendency of people to believe that they have some control over purely random outcomes.
A third psychological tendency contributing to an optimistic bias is known as the above average effect. This is the belief of most people that they are more skilled than the average person. This is particularly true with respect to activities in which a person believes that he or she is already highly skilled and experienced. People who believe themselves less at risk than the average person also perceive safety campaigns as less relevant to their own situations.
A fourth psychological tendency adding to optimistic bias is what is called optimistic overconfidence. This is the tendency of people to overestimate their own knowledge and skills when compared to actual performance. It happens because we tend to focus too much on information that supports what we want to believe.
Fifth, people are also susceptible to an out-of-sight, out-of-mind psychological tendency, whereby they are apt to consider only the risks that easily come to mind, and ignore those that do not immediately grab their attention. Thus, those risks that are reported in the media and brought to our attention are overestimated whereas causes of death that are not publicized, and are therefore more difficult to remember, are underestimated.
The prospect theory is the sixth psychological tendency encompassed by the optimistic bias. The prospect theory is the recognition that when a person considers a low-probability event, he or she first decides whether the possibility of the perceived event is too low to be seriously considered. The time frame of the risk is also relevant in this regard. For example, most people conceptualize the risk of driving in terms of a single trip. In this context, the risk of an accident is normally viewed as very slight. Thus it is rarely considered in the decision whether or not to make a particular trip. On the other hand, if the act of driving is viewed over the course of a lifetime the possibility of being involved in an accident appears considerably larger.
According to Dr. Griffin, there are at least two obstacles that make it difficult for people to overcome the effects of the optimistic bias, despite warnings.
The first obstacle to overcoming the optimistic bias is called the just world belief. This is a belief motivated by our desire to convince ourselves that we live in a world where bad things happen to bad people, and therefore hazards and risks are brought on by personal failure rather than by uncontrollable events that occur only through random chance. Because most people believe that they are good, competent, and careful, they adopt the belief that serious life threatening accidents though they may occur will not happen to them.
The second obstacle to overcoming the optimistic bias is the recognized psychological principal that protective behavior is influenced by the perception of the low probability of severe events. Manufacturers do nothing to dispel the myth that the probability of a rollover is low.
A combination of all these recognized psychological tendencies results in what is known as the optimistic bias. It causes optional Rollover Protective Safety frame systems (ROPS) to not be purchased by consumers who, like you and me, are psychologically conditioned to ignore risks perceived as unlikely. We want to believe that products designed and sold as standard equipment are safe for foreseeable uses. Because of the optimistic bias, we have a tendency to believe that serious, sometimes even fatal, consequences will not happen to us. This bias is further reinforced by the failure of manufacturers to advise the buying public of statistics dealing with the frequency of mower rollovers and by the excessive markup price of optional ROPS which often exceeds by many times the cost of manufacture.
John Gehlhausen has many years of experience representing victims of riding mower and garden tractor accidents. If you or a loved one has suffered injuries from a mower or tractor accident, please contact The Law Offices of John Gehlhausen, P.C. to schedule a consultation with our experienced authority to discuss your legal options.