Drivers know dangers of texting at wheel, and do it anyway: US survey
Survey reveals that everyone knows the dangers, but most do it anyway
Nearly everyone agrees that texting and driving is dangerous. Many do it anyway.
In a new US survey, 98 per cent of motorists who own mobile phones and text regularly said they were aware of the dangers, yet three-quarters of them admitted to texting while driving, despite laws against it in some states.
Two-thirds said they had read text messages while stopped at a red light or stop sign, while more than a quarter said they had sent texts while driving.
More than a quarter of the texting drivers believed they "can easily do several things at once, even while driving".
The telephone survey of 1,004 American adults was released on Wednesday by AT&T as part of an anti-texting-and-driving campaign. AT&T designed the survey with David Greenfield, founder of the Centre for Internet and Technology Addiction and a professor at the University of Connecticut's school of medicine.
The survey came as AT&T expanded availability of a free app that silences text message alerts and activates automatically when a person is moving 24km/h or faster. Passengers can turn it off. The DriveMode app is coming to iPhones after being previously available on Android and BlackBerry phones for AT&T users only. The iPhone version will be available to customers of competing carriers as well, but some functions will work only on AT&T devices.
The study in May was of mobile phone owners aged 16 to 65 who drive almost every day and text at least once a day. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
Greenfield said the survey was the latest to show a discrepancy between people's attitudes and behaviours.
It found a broad range of reasons why drivers text. Forty-three per cent of the texting drivers said they wanted to "stay connected" to friends, family and work. Nearly a third did it out of habit.
Twenty-eight per cent said they were worried about missing something important if they did not check their phones right away. More than a quarter believed that their driving performance was not affected by texting, and just as many people said they believed that others expect them to respond to texts "right away".
Just 6 per cent answered that they were "addicted to texting", although 14 per cent admitted that they were "anxious" if they did not respond to a text right away, and 17 per cent felt "a sense of satisfaction" when they could read or respond to a text message.
Reggie Shaw was 19 in 2006 when he caused a car accident while texting, killing two people. Today, he speaks out against texting and driving.
"It's something I struggle with every day," he said. "I know that I need to go out and talk to others about it. I don't want others to make the same mistake I did."
Shaw does not remember what he was texting about right before the accident. Back then, he said, "being on my phone when I drove was something I did all the time. It was just driving to me."
He said: "I guess you'd call it ignorance but I never understood that it was dangerous. How could me being on the phone cause a car accident?"
Greenfield, who studies the effects of digital technology on the brain, likes to call smartphones "the world's smallest slot machines" because they affect the brain in similar ways that gambling or drugs can. Dopamine levels increase as you anticipate messages, and that leads to higher levels of pleasure. Getting desirable messages can increase dopamine levels further.
