Carnegie Mellon research shows cellphone use may not cause more car crashes

[DavidDvorkin]

This will be greeted by screams of outrage and denial.

PITTSBURGH—For almost 20 years, it has been a wide-held belief that talking on a cellphone while driving is dangerous and leads to more accidents. However, new research from Carnegie Mellon University and the London School of Economics and Political Science suggests that talking on a cellphone while driving does not increase crash risk.

Published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the study uses data from a major cellphone provider and accident reports to contradict previous findings that connected cellphone use to increased crash risk. Such findings include the influential 1997 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, which concluded that cellphone use by drivers increased crash risk by a factor of 4.3 — effectively equating its danger to that of illicit levels of alcohol. The findings also raise doubts about the traditional cost-benefit analyses used by states that have, or are, implementing cellphone-driving bans as a way to promote safety.

"Using a cellphone while driving may be distracting, but it does not lead to higher crash risk in the setting we examined," said Saurabh Bhargava, assistant professor of social and decision sciences in CMU's Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. "While our findings may strike many as counterintuitive, our results are precise enough to statistically call into question the effects typically found in the academic literature. Our study differs from most prior work in that it leverages a naturally occurring experiment in a real-world context."

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-08/cmu-cmr080813.php

[Turbineguy]

1. But then again

maybe the other drivers have learned to look out for people who are too fucking busy to drive while they yack on the phone and compensate for it.

[PoliticAverse]

2. .pdf of the paper being discussed...

https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/bhargava/BhargavaPathania2013_AEJ.pdf

[Fumesucker]

3. There's enough drivers out there that that can't manage the job without talking on the phone

It's not the already attentive and careful drivers you have to worry about so much, like any other skill there is a statistical distribution of good, average and bad drivers. A good driver talking on a phone may not be much added risk, an already marginally skilled driver talking on the phone is another thing altogether.

[midnight]

4. I never thought of cell phone talking being anymore dangerous than other passengers, or smoking.....

But I'm concerned about texting....

[RC]

7. Talking on a cell phone is not the same as talking to a passenger.

Passengers can see what is going on around them and stop talking and/or warn the driver.
The person on the other end of a cell phone cannot do that, and so keeps talking, which may be just enough of a distraction, i.e., increased reaction time, to be in an accident.

[midnight]

10. Sounds like some of your passengers are above three feet......

[FSogol]

5. I've always wondered if car crashes increased when they added radios to cars.

Today, people messing with their car's audio systems, may cause the occasional accident, I suspect that people learned to use it safety while driving and the initial increase in accidents leveled off.

A bigger problem today is texting and driving. Texters, unlike most drunks, are not even looking out the windshield.

[adirondacker]

6. Think You're Multitasking? Think Again

Multitasking: A Human Delusion?

"People can't multitask very well, and when people say they can, they're deluding themselves," said neuroscientist Earl Miller. And, he said, "The brain is very good at deluding itself."

Miller, a Picower professor of neuroscience at MIT, says that for the most part, we simply can't focus on more than one thing at a time.

What we can do, he said, is shift our focus from one thing to the next with astonishing speed.

"Switching from task to task, you think you're actually paying attention to everything around you at the same time. But you're actually not," Miller said.

"You're not paying attention to one or two things simultaneously, but switching between them very rapidly."

Miller said there are several reasons the brain has to switch among tasks. One is that similar tasks compete to use the same part of the brain.

"Think about writing an e-mail and talking on the phone at the same time. Those things are nearly impossible to do at the same time," he said.

"You cannot focus on one while doing the other. That's because of what's called interference between the two tasks," Miller said. "They both involve communicating via speech or the written word, and so there's a lot of conflict between the two of them."

Researchers say they can actually see the brain struggling. And now they're trying to figure out the details of what's going on."

snip

"Dominant — and, perhaps, too confident in our own skill. Studies show that we frequently overestimate our ability to handle multiple tasks.

For early humans, that sort of miscalculation could have meant becoming a tiger's lunch. These days, the consequences are more likely to be stress, a blunder — or maybe a car crash."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95256794

[RC]

8. True, we are not very good at multitasking.

With our built in arrogance and supposed superiority, we just think we are.

[adirondacker]

9. I was going to post that I trust my own observations frequently over a narrow study. All I can say

is that I've seen PLENTY of drivers at a full stop in the middle of an intersection yapping on their phone, lane swervers that would put any drunk to shame, along with erratic slow speed then throttle drivers in the passing lane.

I personally, never had a problem with changing radio stations, eating, and smoing on the fly. Picking up a cell call is the most distracting thing I've ever done. Texting is plain madness. JMHO

[ecstatic]

11. The tone of the conversation might play a role...

I've personally witnessed friends (who I consider "good" drivers) run red lights when they're angry or arguing with someone. Normal conversation on a cell while driving might be safe, but heated arguments (whether in person or on the phone) are not. In my opinion.