Originally Posted by meanwhile

Yes: congratulations on understanding part of what the smart kids understood pages ago. Helmets are useful in relatively minor but relatively common impacts, at the possible cost of making more significant injuries worse. Is this a good trade off? It's doubtful.

You also have several more problems:

1. Helmets increase effective head size making a hit more likely

2. The evidence is that helmets make drivers take more risks with cyclists - and cause cyclists to take more risks too

3. Helmets may interfere with balance, hearing, periperal vision. *May.*

..So given that the benefits of wearing a helmet are slight - at best - and the downsides are hard to assess but potentially more significant than the benefits, hassling other people for not wearing them is just stupid. Like deciding that one side in a case must be lying because you (or rather, someone a lot smarter than you) caught the other side doing it..

So why do people make a big deal out of helmets? Well -

- Most people are stupid, but don't like being made aware of this

- Most people are very social consensus oriented - ie they believe what society tells them, and trying to argue with "social signals" causes them acute discomfort (this is often especially the case with people who boast of being independent thinkers)

- Many people are scared and rely on the comfort of helmets to deal with a fear that, rationally, they shouldn't have

This is why the only people in this debate to take a fact based approach are helmet sceptics: the facts are so damning that you have to be irrationally invested in wearing a helmet to ignore them. (In fact, most of the sceptics probably started by wanting to buy a helmet, but being in the tiny minority of "rationals" checked to see which model would be safest - then found out that none offered worthwhile safety and became annoyed with helmet makers deceptive marketing and the gullibility of most wearers. I did.)