Here’s some old but very interesting data from the US. It shows total ‘emplanements’ (individuals boarding a plane) either within the US or on a flight to the US between January 2001 and April 2004.
That big dip is, of course, the impact of 9/11. Watching those attacks, which involved the hijacking of multiple planes, will have left many travellers worried about the potential risks of flying. Total emplanements that month dropped by nearly 20m (from 57m to 39m) and even in it October only recovered slightly, reaching 44.9m. It took more than two and a half years for total emplanements to reach pre-9/11 levels. By this point (April 2004), security measures had been dramatically enhanced. New, nationwide measures included:
A swelling of the list of prohibited items, including razor blades and box-cutters
Checked baggage started being screened by x-ray
Creation of the TSA
Shoe removal at security gates
Explosive detection systems
Pilots given voluntary firearms training
Reinforcement of cockpit doors
ID checks required to clear security
In retrospect, a number of these changes seem eminently sensible and it may be a surprise to our younger readers that before September 2001 checked baggage was largely unchecked and you could saunter onto a plane with a box cutter.
Many of these measures spread globally; today we routinely arrive at airports hours in advance to ensure we have enough time to work our way through the long queues inching through security. Those gates – once a simple box-ticking exercise on the way to luxury, high speed travel – are now among the most inconvenient places we encounter, full of angrily muttering tourists putting laptops in the wrong trays and forgetting about watches and jewellery, trying to walk casually through the body scanner while feeling very conspicuous. It’s made all the worse on those occasions when despite knowing the litany of rules you must follow you still mess up – like seeing a full size bottle of sunscreen tossed in the bin because you forgot to pack the travel one.1
All of this is a long way of saying that we put up with an awful lot of inconvenience to feel safe. Consumers do not like taking risks and when an everyday activity suddenly feels dangerous, we stop doing it.
Risk aversion
For a recent example of this, cast your mind back just a few years to the first lockdown. Today it’s quite common to encounter people who claim they were never worried, or who thought the lockdowns were a big overreaction. At the time, those people probably followed the rules - partly out of duty and partly out of fear – just like the rest of us. This paper analyses compliance with lockdown rules and finds that while noncompliance did increase for some groups from summer 2020 onwards, in March 2020 we pretty much all did what we were told (with some notable exceptions).
The innate importance of safety is why the proportion of consumers who say that it is important to them to have a life filled with adventure and risk is consistently small. Here’s a very boring chart showing data from the last 18 years. On almost every occasion, the proportion of people who crave risk and adventure is between 20% and 25%.
Predictably, where risk-taking does exist it is a pursuit of the young. In the data from the last couple of years, 44% of the under 25s identify as adventurous risk-takers, compared to less than 10% of those over 60. This is very much an age-effect rather than a cohort effect: back in 2005, 42% of under 25s were adventurous. That same group today (now ensconced in their thirties and early forties) see scores of 35%. Our appetites for risk only diminish as we get older (and probably wiser).
Fairly frequently, a comment or trends piece emerges that highlights how adventurous, outgoing and thrill-seeking consumers are becoming. In an experience economy, the capacity to take risks – or seek extreme experiences - is high. But there’s an important caveat – the market for these experiences is small unless the risk is removed from them.
You’ll have noticed that there is one data point that slightly bucks the trend in the chart above. In 2015, the proportion of consumers who described themselves as adventurous and risk-taking actually fell to 16%. This wasn’t a sustained trend but rather an accident of timing. Back then Trajectory asked this question as part of global survey that ran on an annual basis,2 and that year’s data for the UK happened to be collected immediately after the terror attacks in Paris. It essentially caused the kind of fear-induced behaviour change that also plays out in the emplanement data from the US after 9/11. By 2018, consumer attitudes were back to normal.
That’s another key implication from all this: although we’re risk averse, we’re also relatively easy to reassure.
What does this mean?
Analyses asserting that consumers are getting more adventurous should be questioned. The data shows that we’re just as risk averse as we were 20 years ago.
Those who are risk-takers are young. We grow out of this pretty quickly. But today’s young people are just as adventurous as yesterday’s.
We recover quickly. Big events, like 9/11 or the Paris terror attacks in November 2015 knock our confidence. But we get back to old ways fairly soon – although sometimes this requires significant changes to the way we do things.
Our appetite for risk doesn’t appear to dramatically increase or decrease when the world is more challenging. 2005 and 2022 are very different eras, but consumer adventurousness is the same.
Written from experience. Still hurts.
Since 2021, it’s been asked every month on our Optimism Index monitor