Albert Einstein once said, “Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.” Or maybe it was Mark Twain. Or Yogi Berra. Or Lao Tzu. In any case, who said it is beside the point. The real point is this: you have a limited pool of attention, and any attention that you use for activities other than driving is attention that you take away from driving.
That makes the question of distracted driving seem pretty cut-and-dried, but like most questions about the brain, there’s more to it. Whether or not you should make out while driving depends on how much attention it takes to drive, how much attention it takes to kiss, and how much attention you have to go around. If the attention needed to drive plus the attention needed to osculate is less than the pool of attention you have to spend, why not smooch behind the wheel?
Of course, what we’re really talking about here is texting. Can your brain safely text while driving? And how does texting compare with making out? Here’s a short answer from the American Journal of Public Health: “After declining from 1999 to 2005, fatalities from distracted driving increased 28 percent after 2005, rising from 4,572 fatalities to 5,870 in 2008. Crashes increasingly involved male drivers driving alone in collisions with roadside obstructions in urban areas. We predicted that increasing texting volumes resulted in more than 16,000 additional road fatalities from 2001 to 2007.”
Them’s pretty strong words. And if you are a male driver prone to texting as you drive alone in urban areas, maybe you should stop right here. But the thing about statistics is that while they’re pretty good at describing the view from ten thousand feet of what tends to happen in large populations of people, they’re pretty awful at making predictions about what will happen with any individual person. Overall, it’s not a good idea for people to text while driving. But what about you? Are you on a special place on the bell curves of attention, skill, and driving, so that texting while driving is bad for other people but fine for you?
How much are you willing to bet?
One thing that can cloud your judgment is overconfidence in your skills. Did you know that about 80 percent of people are “above-average” drivers? Of course that’s impossible. But studies show that a disproportionate percentage of people believe they are above-average drivers. Which is to say that you may not be fully rational when it comes to the evaluation of your own skills behind the wheel of a motor vehicle.
Another thing that affects your bet is just how much a smartphone throws off your mojo. An article in the journal Environment and Behavior shows that even the presence of a smartphone on a table reduces the quality of a conversation taking place. If even something as important as trying to hook up over a dinner date is crushed by the mere presence of a cell phone, do you really think you are immune to the distraction of texting while driving?
When you put these two facts together you get a situation in which you can’t really trust your evaluation of your driving skill and you can’t really trust your opinion that of course your smartphone isn’t a distraction. And the truth is you really don’t know if, as you drive alone in urban areas, you are as much at risk as a male driver prone to texting or if you are somehow excused from the statistics. The brain’s inability to be rational about its own abilities and challenges behind the wheel means that even when you don’t feel like you’re risking it, you might be risking it. Now, making out is another question altogether, and until solid research comes out against it, there seems no need to contraindicate something so nice.
Fear or Rules for Stopping Teen Texting?
Want to make your teenager stop texting while driving? An article in the Academy of Marketing Studies Journal shows that your best strategy depends on whether the teenager is a boy or a girl. The study of 840 young adults shows that girls were most receptive to “fear appeals” via social media—for example, showing pictures of terrible texting-while-driving accidents—whereas young men were “much more likely than females to suggest using laws and legal action to discourage distracted driving.” Rules or fear: match the right appeal to the right teenage gender and you’ve got a better chance at stopping texting while driving.