As a research on driver behavior, I applaud U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood's call for a nationwide ban on texting and cell phone use while driving. The recommendation from the National Transportation Board followed a fatal crash in Missouri last year, caused by a teen driver distracted by texting.
There is now an abundance of evidence on the problem. Texting is worse than cell phone use, but neither, in my view, should be legal. NHTSA now has a dedicated website for the issue— www.distraction.gov—which includes links to research studies.
We are doing some work in my driver performance lab on distraction in fatigued drivers, but I will write about that another time. (For now, the conclusion is that cellphone conversations won't help to keep you alert if you are tired.) What I will address here is public irrationality. The science of the dangers of phones is solid. According to NTHSA (http://www.distraction.gov/research/PDF-Files/Distracted-Driving-...), 995 people in 2009 died in fatal crashes that involved reports of a cell phone as a distraction. Banning phone use would save lives - so why wouldn't we want to do it?
One factor is selfishness. Phone use is interwoven into the fabric of many people's lives, so the inconvenience of not phoning and driving is real.
In addition, the probability of phone use causing a crash during any individual trip is very low. The NHTSA distraction site also reports that at any given moment during daylight hours, over 800,000 vehicles are being driven by someone using a hand-held cell phone. Obviously, very few of these vehicles crash. Even over a year's driving, the elevation of the individual's risk is slight. What this comes down to is that if the life you save by not phoning is probably someone else's. The benefit of a phone ban is more for society in general than for individual phone users, and not everyone sees sacrificing personal convenience as worthwhile.
However, resistance to a cell phone ban is not just a matter or selfishness. Another research topic I have been working on lately is biases in decision-making, especially overconfidence. It's well known that drivers over-estimate their safety and skill, and it's likely that such misunderstanding feeds into reluctance to stop phoning.
It's tempting to see overconfidence is egotistical or narcissistic, and such personality traits may indeed contribute to over-estimation of personal confidence. But the decision-making literature shows that bias is often cognitive in nature. For example, people are notably bad at reasoning about small probabilities (e.g., crash risk on any particular trip). There is a particular blind spot in reasoning about the self; people tend to be more objective in their appraisals of personality.
Judgments are affected by the availability heuristic - what comes to mind spontaneously in considering an issue. The availability heuristic is likely helpful in combating drunk driving - it's easy to recall memories of drunk people who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a vehicle. Cell phone use is more likely to bring to mind memories of routine and unthreatening events.
And what of personality factors? As a recent article by Hilton et al. (2011) discusses, there are individual differences in traits such as illusory control and unrealistic optimism. But, in Hilton et al.'s empirical studies, these traits did not predict overconfidence on making numerical judgments on a laboratory task (answering trivia questions). I suspect personality has more of an impact on tasks in which people are personally invested, such as driving. But we shouldn't ascribe resistance to limiting cell phone use to selfishness alone. Improving driver safety needs a serious attempt to understanding drivers' misperceptions of risk, and to train realism. And perhaps a valid scale for selfishness.
Hilton, D., Regner, I., Cabantous's, L., Charalambides, L., , & Vautier, S. (2011). Do positive illusions predict overconfidence in judgment? A test using interval production and probability evaluation measures of miscalibration. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 24(2), 117-139.
