Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

Applying Psychology 
in the 21st Century
Driven to Distraction
Twenty-four year old Aiden Quinn 
couldn’t believe his good fortune. At his 
young age, he had beaten the competition 
to land his dream job of conducting 
trolleys through the streets of Boston. But 
in just one moment his world came 
crashing down around him: It was the 
moment when he took his eyes off the 
tracks to send a text message to his 
girlfriend and the trolley he was driving 
crashed into the one ahead of it.
If you’ve ever texted while driving, you’re 
not alone. A recent survey conducted by 
the AAA Foundation for Traffi c Safety 
shows that nearly half of drivers aged 18 to 
24 admit to doing so, even though the ma-
jority of them were aware that they were 
increasing their risk of having an accident. 
In fact, nearly 90% of survey respondents 
rated texting while driving as a very seri-
ous threat to safety (AAA Foundation for 
Traffi c Safety, 2008, 2009).
Researchers are now confi rming what 
intuition suggests is true: The distraction 
caused by texting while driving is ex-
tremely dangerous. One study used video 
cameras to monitor truckers on long hauls 
and found that they were 23 times more 
likely to be in a collision while texting than 
while not texting. In collisions caused by 
texting, the driver had typically taken his 
eyes off the road for about 5 seconds—a 
seemingly short period of time until you 
realize that a vehicle at highway speed 
travels about 150 yards in those few sec-
onds (Virginia Tech Transportation Insti-
tute, 2009).
Another study using college students 
and a driving simulator showed that text-
ing produced the same duration of about 
5 seconds of distraction and that the stu-
dents were 8 times more likely to have a 
collision while texting. Although those 
may seem like better odds, they’re still 
much worse than the risk presented by 
other distractors such as changing the sta-
tion on a car’s radio. Even though the 
study used students, who are likely skillful 
at texting and multitasking, and light ve-
hicles that are more maneuverable than 
trucks, the results clearly show that texting 
while driving poses a terrifi c risk (Cooper 
& Strayer, 2008).
Multitasking in general is diffi cult. For 
instance, in one study, researchers divided 
a group of college students into two 
groups, one composed of students who 
multitasked online regularly and a second 
that did not. The frequent multitaskers 
were more easily distracted, and they were 
unable to fi lter out stimuli that were irrele-
vant to tasks that they were trying to com-
plete (Ophir, Nass, & Wagner, 2009)
If you, like many of the respondents to 
the AAA Foundation for Traffi c Safety sur-
vey, believe that you’re the exception to the 
rule, just keep one thing in mind: that’s 
what Aiden Quinn thought, too. He lost his 
job and is facing civil lawsuits and criminal 
prosecution.
• Most people assume that they are able to text and drive at the same time without 
declines in their driving ability. Why do you think that is the case, and how accu-
rate is their assumption?
• Why would frequent multitaskers be more distractible than those who multitask 
less frequently?
RETHINK
Increasing research shows that texting while 
driving is extremely dangerous.
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Ways of Exciting Students 
and Helping Them Relate 
Psychology to Their World