A certain level of risk in our lives is accepted as necessary to achieve certain benefits.
For example, driving an automobile is a risk many people take daily, also since it is mitigated by the controlling factor of their perception of their individual ability to manage the risk-creating situation.
Under these circumstances, individuals require the probability of risk to be as much as one thousand times smaller than for the same situation under their perceived control (a notable example being the common bias in the perception of risk in flying vs.
The Declaration of Helsinki, adopted by the World Medical Association, states that biomedical research cannot be done legitimately unless the importance of the objective is in proportion to the risk to the subject.
The Helsinki Declaration[3] and the CONSORT Statement[4] stress a favorable risk–benefit ratio.