Phones And Driving

We all know how it feels to be driving and receiving text from friends and or family. Its very hard to say no to yourself after you see the notification. A lot of people just tell themselves "just real quick" or "just this one time". Everyone knows that texting and driving is a bad idea but nobody knows exactly why. About 90 percent of car crashes are not due to drunk drivers or people who are speeding. But they are due to drivers like me and you who think they can do two things at once.

Answering these text messages takes a lot of attention off the road. As humans we can only multitask in a couple ways and they aren't that good. Texting and driving causes you lose awareness of what's around you. People crash most cause they don't see oncoming vehicles or they don't see certain things from a distance. Keeping your eyes off the road can be the difference between life or death in a car crash. It all comes down to how fast you were going and your reflexes.

driving doesn't feel dangerous. We may recognize on a cognitive level that distracted driving is stupid, but we have no accompanying visceral feeling of fear, no associated emotion to guide our decision-making in the moment of temptation. Our brains do such a good job making us feel like we're in charge that we don't realize it's all an illusion until it's too late. If our hearts started racing as soon as our attention started to drift, we might be more inclined to stay focused.

we feel immune to the risks that affect other people. Researchers who study texting while driving find that their participants "have observed others driving erratically while using a cell phone, but these participants rarely, if ever, thought that their own driving was impaired when they used the cell phone." And despite the fact that there is no benefit to practice (people who regularly use their cell phone while driving perform no better in studies than those with less real-life experience), the belief that we can manage persists. Consistent with this, three out of four people think they are above average drivers (a statistical impossibility). We are simply overconfident in our abilities.