Most motorists know that driving while distracted is extremely dangerous, yet they continue to do it anyway in frightening numbers.
You might consider it a case of collective cognitive dissonance if distracted drivers felt stress or mental discomfort over the contradiction.
But that’s just the problem — they don’t.
Dr. Breeda McGrath, Dean of Academic Affairs at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, explained that people are lulled into feeling that driving doesn’t require their full attention. As modern cars become more automated and less dependent on driver inputs to operate smoothly, that false sense of security is only reinforced.
This result is motorists’ belief that they’ve got this driving thing handled so they can perform other tasks simultaneously — which they decidedly cannot.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 3,154 people in 2013 were killed in crashes involving a distracted driver. That’s in addition to 424,000 injuries linked to distracted driving, a 10 percent increase since 2011. All told, distracted driving was implicated in nearly 1 out of 5 crashes.
“Most drivers feel safe and in control, and therefore act accordingly,” McGrath told Cars.com. “Driving can feel like a passive, automatic activity that doesn’t require thinking, so in that state, people are free to think [about] a variety of other activities, things they want to do, people they need to connect with. It’s essentially about multitasking.”
Moreover, there’s the it’s-not-going-to-happen-to-me factor to contend with, especially among teen drivers who commonly feel a sense of invulnerability. Therefore, in all the times people use their smartphones while driving and nothing bad happens, they receive primarily positive feedback neurologically and chemically without the competing message of impending disaster, McGrath explained.
“The consequences are generally not serious most of the time, so the likelihood of something happening feels small,” she said. “If you experienced a fender-bender or crash every time you used your phone while driving, you would quickly change your behavior.”
Earlier this summer, the dangers of distracted driving were illustrated with digital clarity as the wildly popular “Pokemon Go” smartphone-app-based game was implicated in multiple car crashes. But Pokemon was hardly the point of origin for smartphone distractions. A Liberty Mutual Insurance study released in August showed that while just more than a quarter of teens admitted to texting and driving, more than two-thirds had used smartphone apps behind the wheel due to an unconscious bias that the latter behavior is somehow safer.
In an opinion poll from earlier this year, the National Safety Council asked motorists ages 18 to 39 which social media platforms they would use while driving, and how often they would use other varied smartphone functions, if these activities weren’t illegal.
Here are the top 10 social media platforms people feel comfortable using while driving, followed by the percentage of survey respondents reporting so:
10. Vine, 7 percent
9. Pinterest, 10 percent
8. LinkedIn, 13 percent
7. Waze, 13 percent
6. Snapchat, 13 percent
5. WhatsApp, 24 percent
4. Instagram, 33 percent
3. YouTube, 35 percent
2. Twitter, 37 percent
1. Facebook, 74 percent
Read more of the original article at Cars.com.
