This book chapter addresses the conceptual and philosophical underpinnings of an often identified and progressively ever more evident driving safety hazard--driver distraction, which is becoming as bad a problem on the roads as drunk driving. It is argued in this chapter that there are 2 fundamental forms of this hazard: driver distraction, which occurs when circumstances act to displace the primacy of the social role "driver" in the person's on-road behavior (e.g., turning around to attend to an infant in the back seat); and distracted driving, in which the individual retains the primary role as the "driver" but circumstances act to divert attention from the appropriate course of action to other momentarily inappropriate components of the driving task or the external environment. The authors posit that the very nature of driving as a satisfying task encourages and reinforces the first form of distraction, while the specific nature of vehicle control in dynamic environments means that, on occasion, this second form is virtually unavoidable. Adverse consequences, in the form of collisions, result from a sequence of interdependent events of which this momentary lapsein attention is certainly one. Blame for such collisions is a viscerally satisfying but scientifically stultifying correlate of these adverse outcomes. This chapter offers the beginnings of an alternative interpretation of distraction events, which suggest potential progress beyond the unhelpful propensity to attribute monocausal blame.
Abstract