Cell-phone use diminishes self-awareness of impaired driving
DOI: 10.3758/s13423-015-0922-4
archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified
Summary
Driving-simulator study (Sanbonmatsu, Strayer, Biondi, Behrends, Moore; U. Utah; Psychon Bull Rev 2016, doi:10.3758/s13423-015-0922-4) testing whether cell-phone conversation diminishes self-awareness of one's own driving errors. Participants drove a DriveSafety DS-600 simulator under single-task driving or dual-task driving + hands-free cell-phone conversation. An experimenter tabulated driving errors (lane departures, missed stops, etc.) on a checklist; immediately after, participants rated their own driving safety, ability to drive while distracted, and tried to recall their specific errors. Replicating prior work, cell-phone participants made more serious driving errors than controls. Critically, control participants' self-ratings of driving safeness/ability correlated negatively with their actual error counts (calibrated insight), while cell-phone participants' self-ratings were uncorrelated with actual errors — a dissociation between performance and metacognition specific to the multitasking condition.
Key finding
Cell-phone conversation while driving not only degrades performance, it also breaks the link between actual performance and self-assessment: drivers who talked on a cell phone showed no correlation between self-rated safeness and observed driving errors, whereas non-talking drivers' self-ratings tracked their errors. Multitasking thus diminishes self-monitoring, which explains why distracted drivers fail to take corrective action.
Methodology
Driving-simulator study. DriveSafety DS-600 simulator with a standard scenario. Between-subjects assignment to control (single-task drive) or cell-phone (hands-free conversation) condition. Trained experimenter recorded driving errors on a standardized checklist while participants drove. Immediately after, participants completed self-assessment ratings (safeness, ability while distracted) and tried to recall their specific driving errors using the same checklist.
Sample size: N=69 (driving-error severity table reports N=69 participants; ~30/condition).
Quality score: 5 / 5