Understand Why People Ignore Safety Precautions

The goal of the study was to understand why people ignore safety precautions, even though they knew the implications of using a cell phone while driving is dangerous. Another reasonable goal was to determine if cell phone conversations cause distractions, which leads to high amount of car accidents. The study made participants complete self-assessments and reports to measure the frequency of cell phone usage while driving. The experiment used psychological factors to evaluate the skills of driving performance.

In the study, they used three psychological factors to explain the implication of phone usage while driving. They are the perception of ability to compensate (overestimating one ability), illusion of control, and controlling cognitive

In phase 2, participants completed driving simulations, which is similar to the basic driving task. In this partilcaur task, the participant had to stop at couple 4-way intersections with stoplights and stop signs. There were minimum traffic and had to watch out for speeding cars that pass by. They had to press a button on the steering wheel, and had to take precaution whenever there was a car passing by. This stimulation task was conducted to measure driving mistakes, but it did not measure driving

Many participants experienced positive illusions while they performed the driving stimulation task. In chapter 3, we talked a lot about perceptions, particularly illusions. Illusion can cause us to misperceive reality. The results of this stimulations task predicted that frequent users of cell phone tended to overestimate their driving performance while talking on their cell phone. They are mostly unconscious when speaking on the phone and carrying a conversation while driving. This makes them unaware of the effect it can have on their driving ability and can severely impair their performance to