Bill Shankly, arguably Liverpool FC’s most influential manager, famously said: “football is a simple game made complicated by people ...”. Change the endeavour and level of difficulty and it can become: “Driving is a complicated task made simple by people”. Or rather, for practised drivers it appears simple, most of the time. To appreciate the complexity of driving, think back to your time as a learner. Remember the frustration of trying to balance clutching, shifting gears, maintaining the right engine revs, being aware of your surroundings, and keeping a good road position – all while your dad pointed out that you were doing most of these badly.
But with practice, it gets easier. Eventually, you don’t even think about it. It becomes automatic. In psychological terms, driving transitions from a conscious process, which is limited in capacity and can only handle one task at a time, to an unconscious one with much greater capacity, albeit limited to learned routines. This allows experienced drivers to simultaneously do things such as shifting gears, accelerating, holding a conversation and adjusting the radio volume. It’s an impressive feat of multitasking. Experience generates the impression that multitasking within the car is easy – until it is not.
For instance, if a driver tries to search for a packet of sweets in the door pocket, their conscious mind becomes engaged, reducing the resources available to react to sudden events. A driver paying full attention might avoid hitting a child who suddenly runs on to the road, but the distraction of searching for that packet of sweets increases the risk of a collision. And the more demanding the distraction – think texting – the greater the risk of a fatality. This is the paradox of driving: its perceived simplicity makes it dangerous. We often feel we’re driving well within our capacity, which leads us to believe we can handle additional non-driving related tasks.
The Irish Times recently reported that gardaí from the mobile policing unit “see people in traffic watching matches on their tablets or laptops, people eating breakfast cereal, putting on their make-up, shaving”.
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Unfortunately, forensic investigations after road fatalities show that distraction and inattention are major contributors to such collisions.
The data suggests that distraction plays a role in anywhere from 10 to 40 per cent of road fatalities worldwide and this figure is only going in one direction. Mobile phones are a leading culprit. Even a simple conversation can be problematic. Many people think it’s just like chatting with a passenger, but it’s not. A passenger in the car can sense when the driver is facing a difficult situation and adjust the conversation accordingly – staying quiet while navigating a complex roundabout, say. Someone on the other end of a phone call has no idea what the driver is experiencing and might start discussing something urgent, engaging part of the driver’s conscious capacity, which will no longer be available to the driving task. This increases the risk of a collision.
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To give an example, if you’re travelling at 50km/h and take your eyes off the road for just two seconds, you’ll have covered over 25 metres - about the length of two double-decker buses – without any visual contact with the road, leaving you unable to respond to hazards. Devices that distract drivers, such as complicated touchscreen infotainment systems with cumbersome menus, pose asignificant risk. While they may help sell cars, they also present clear safety issues. In fact, regulatory bodies within the EU are working to address these concerns and could mandate the use of physical buttons for essential controls, ensuring they are immediately accessible without navigating through a digital display.
Another factor that affects how we drive is our perception of risk. Problematic driving behaviours, such as not wearing a seat belt, carry inherent risks that could be quantified under certain conditions. However, our personal experiences and the role of chance heavily influence how we assess those risks. Take two newly qualified drivers who decide to drive without seat belts. Driver A, through “bad” luck, gets into a minor collision early on and learns that driving without a seat belt is dangerous. Driver B, by chance, goes six months without an incident and concludes that driving without a seat belt is safe. Later, both are involved in serious crashes. Driver A’s seat belt probably saves his life, while Driver B isn’t so lucky. Our experiences, then, continually inform our appreciation of risk and have a direct impact on our behaviour.
As humans, it’s natural for experience to shape our perception of risk. Hunter-gatherers understood the dangers of the forest because they received immediate feedback on risky behaviours – such as the pain of stepping on a venomous snake. Drivers, however, encounter two problems not experienced by hunter-gathers. First, when we do something wrong, we often don’t get accurate feedback about the objective risk associated with our behaviour. For example, overtaking on a blind corner might only result in another driver honking at us, which we can quickly forget as the road opens up. Second, the probability of a serious outcome is usually low. We struggle to adjust our behaviour based on low-probability events. If our experience shows that risky behaviour doesn’t lead to bad outcomes, we come to believe that the behaviour is safer than it is and continue to engage in it, despite objective data suggesting otherwise. For the average driver, using their car is probably the most risky thing they will do on a daily basis, yet they remain effectively oblivious to this risk.
Driving is a complicated task, as demonstrated by the sophisticated technology required by autonomous vehicles to navigate safely. With practice, humans find driving relatively easy, but only if we have enough spare capacity to react to unpredictable events. Unfortunately, this is something we don’t find so easy to do.
Dr Michael Gormley is an assistant professor in the school of psychology at Trinity College Dublin researching road safety topics such as younger and older drivers, road safety education and cyclists
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