Estimates based upon the 2011 National Occupant Protection Use Survey suggest that at any typical daylight moment, approximately 1.2 million motorists were using their cell phone while driving. This is a major public safety issue because of the number of accidents that are attributable to distracted driving (e.g., National Safety Council, 2011) and the substantial body of empirical evidence showing the impairments from talking on a cell phone. Studies of the processes underlying these driving deficits indicate that conversation disrupts scanning and change detection in complex visual scenes, delays the reaction time to imperative events, and may cause a form of inattention blindness whereby observers often fail to notice information that falls directly in their line of gaze. In fact, epidemiological studies have reported that the crash risk may rise to the level associated with alcohol’s legal limit; however, other methods have reported much lower estimates of crash risk associated with cell phone use so the precise crash risk associated with cell phone use is far from settled. Although a great deal is known about the detrimental effects of cellular communication on driving, relatively little research has examined why people engage in this hazardous behaviour. One of the aims of the reported study was to investigate the motivations underlying the usage of cell phones while driving. The ubiquity of cell phone use while driving is perplexing because drivers are often cognizant of the risks of this behaviour. For example, the vast majority of those surveyed reported that driving while using a cell phone as a very serious (57.7%) or serious (30.9%) threat to their personal safety. Moreover, there is an abundance of public service advertisements communicating the dangers of driving and cellular communication. In fact, 37 states in the United States restrict cell phone usage for novice drivers, and 14 states and the District of Columbia ban the use of hand-held phones by all motorists. Finally, surveys have shown that an average of 70% of respondents strongly or somewhat strongly support laws restricting hand-held cell phone use by drivers, and approximately 45% of respondents strongly or somewhat strongly support a total ban on cell phone use while driving. The broad support for legislation to limit cellular use while driving is somewhat surprising, because the majority of people engage in the very behaviour they would outlaw or restrict. The data suggest a “do as I say, not as I do” attitude in which a large percentage of drivers are hypocritical in that they use cell phones during the operation of a motor vehicle while opposing similar behaviour by the public. A second major aim of our study was to understand motorists’ support for legislation to restrict cell phone use behind the wheel and to explain the inconsistency between what many drivers do versus what they advocate. A survey was administered to assess the motivations underlying cell phone use while driving, and the attitudes and beliefs contributing to support for legislation to restrict this practice. Participants were asked to report the risks and benefits of their cell phone use as well as the risks and benefits of others’ cell phone use while driving. They also assessed their abilities and other drivers’ abilities to drive safely while distracted. Finally, they completed the Operation Span task, which has been used previously to measure multitasking ability. We assumed that the decision to use a cell phone during the operation of a motor vehicle, like other choices, would be strongly predicted by the perceived costs and benefits of the behaviour (e.g, Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980; Einhorn & Hogarth, 1981). We also assumed that support for laws to restrict this practice would be predicted by the perceived consequences of others’ usage of cell phones. Participants were expected to report specific benefits from talking on a cell phone, such as getting work done or connecting with friends, that would be predictive of their self-reported cell phone usage while driving. In contrast, we anticipated they would report benefiting little from other drivers’ usage of cell phones. We also expected that drivers would generally be aware of the dangers of talking on a cell phone and that their risk assessments would be negatively correlated with self-reported cellular communication behind the wheel. It was further predicted that participants would see others’ usage of cell phones as a much greater threat to public safety than their own usage, and that this would be major contributor to their support for legislation to restrict this behaviour. We hypothesized that disparities between motorists’ perceptions of the risks of their talking versus the risks of others talking on a cell phone while driving would stem, in part, from delusions they harbour about their driving abilities. Participants in the study were asked to assess their ability and others’ ability to drive safely while distracted. A substantial body of research on self-assessment has shown that people commonly overestimate the favourableness of their abilities, skills, and traits (e.g., Alicke & Govorun, 2005; Dunning, Heath, & Suls, 2004; for limitations, see Moore, 2007) and that, in regard to driving, most individuals perceive themselves to be far better drivers than others. We anticipated that most motorists believe they are capable of driving safely while talking on a cell phone and that this overconfidence contributes to a greater willingness to use cell phones behind the wheel. We further hypothesized that as motorists’ confidence increases, their estimations of the risks of cellular communication while driving decrease. Finally, the study investigated the veracity of peoples’ self-assessments of their ability to drive safely while talking on a cell phone by measuring their general multitasking ability. Prior research has measured multitasking ability using the Operation Span (OSPAN) task, which assesses peoples’ ability to perform simultaneously two distinct tasks (memory and math) that compete for limited capacity attention. The two concurrently performed tasks are independent in that they have distinct stimuli (letters and numbers), require different mental transformations (memorization and arithmetic), have different response outputs (memory recall accuracy and math verification accuracy), and are scored separately (i.e., there are independent scores of memory performance and math performance). Following our own previous work and prior demonstrations of the tenuous relation between self-assessments and performance, we anticipated there would be little correspondence between participants’ subjective beliefs about their ability to drive safely while distracted and a more objective index of their ability to multitask as measured by the OSPAN task. (Author/publisher)
Abstract