"Supertaskers" Can Safely Use Mobile Phones While Driving 388
nk497 writes "While most of us are dangerous when texting, chatting on a phone or being otherwise distracted while driving, one in 40 are actually just fine with such distractions. In a small study, such 'supertaskers' were just as good at driving when carrying on a conversation over a hands-free phone as they were when fully focused. That said, the researchers warned that most people are much worse at driving while chatting and shouldn't do it, adding: 'Given the number of individuals who routinely talk on the phone while driving, one would have hoped that there would be a greater percentage of supertaskers.'"
That 1 in 40 aside, reader crimeandpunishment writes "The US Transportation Department is calling for a permanent ban on texting while driving, for interstate truck and bus drivers. An interim ban has been in place since January. The government says it is doing everything it can to make roads safer by reducing the threat of distracted drivers."
Justification (Score:5, Insightful)
This gives many ignorant people justification to feel like they are really one of those 1 in 40. Just don't fucking do it, whether you think you are good at it or not. I'm sure I could do it, but I try not to even answer the phone when I'm on the road.
Plenty of people (Score:1, Insightful)
think they are awesome multitaskers. They are wrong.
Re:Self-correcting problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope. Just like with drunk drivers, usually the people killed in accidents are the ones who just happened to be in the way, not the person who was doing something really stupid.
Current Slashdot Poll (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the current poll [slashdot.org] is informative here. While I suspect that the average IQ of a slashdot reader is indeed above average, The percentage of "super genius" is probably exaggerated.
The lesson is that while 1/40th of the population falls under the "supertasker" category, the number that claim to be is much, much higher. My estimate would be 1/4th or more perceive themselves that way. And that's a dangerous perception to have.
Re:Oh, Great (Score:2, Insightful)
I can see now a lot of people claiming to be supertaskers.
Well yes, obviously all of us here are among the elite. ;)
(I am so not... you would not believe the extent of injuries I've endured simply walking around the office or my home while thinking about something else... my pinky toe on my right foot is currently broken... again...)
Study is largely only of US importance (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem is this study will be shown to be proof worldwide when there are big differences between the US and other countries when it comes to driving and cars.
In the UK we're mostly manual transmission drivers. An auto is easier to drive when holding a phone, but try holding a phone, steering and changing gear at the same time!!
Open Season (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Natural selection at work? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, what happens is the non-supertaskers take out other people in their way who may or may not be supertaskers. The net effect will be no change in the supertaskers:non-supertaskers ratio.
Great. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cell Phone Vendetta (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not a politician and I'm not in a huff. Instead I'm outraged at the assholes who take my life and that of others in their hands by driving around chatting on their cellphones absolutely oblivious to other drivers.
This is the first time I've cursed on slashdot. I don't like to do it and see far too much of it here and elsewhere. In this case though it's perfectly fitting.
Re:I haven't gotten into an accident yet (Score:2, Insightful)
The keyword is "yet".
I didn't get pulled over a single time until I was 38, yet I probably broke every traffic rule in the book.
Re:Current Slashdot Poll (Score:5, Insightful)
"The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect [wikipedia.org]
"People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it."
http://psycnet.apa.org/?fa=main.doiLanding&doi=10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121 [apa.org]
Re:Self-correcting problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent up. I've recently passed my driving test and, just before I took it, I was nearly hit by a woman who skipped a red light whilst texting. She would have hit the driver's door and I'd be dead. She would be fine. The only thing that saved me was that I'd come out onto the main road slower than I should have; she'd missed the green by a good 10 seconds.
Seriously, anyone who talks or texts whilst driving is a danger. Not only are you distracted, you are NOT in full control of your car as you have only one hand on the wheel.
Re:Cell Phone Vendetta (Score:5, Insightful)
are you retarded enough to suggest just because we can't ban all possible distractions, we should just let drivers do dangerous shit like text while driving? this sounds like the same logic as "condoms are only 99% effective so lets not bother with them!".
Re:Current Slashdot Poll (Score:5, Insightful)
The Dunning-Kruger effect has been running this country for decades.
Re:Better driving skills (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder how many of those had a foreign driver's license.
Are you trying to say non US drivers are worse or better?
I've heard plenty of people say non-US are better, but my limited experience in Spain, Italy and Greece says otherwise. The study suggests what I believe: where ever you have humans, you have huge steaming mounds of stupidity.
Re:Are they just worse drivers to begin with? (Score:3, Insightful)
The sample size was really small in this - 200.
Seriously, waaaay too small to jump to conclusions.
Plus the study needs to be repeated multiple times in different areas by other independent researchers before the results are dependable.
The odds are just as high that the area in Utah they surveyed is home to the ONLY 5 supertaskers in the world.
Please assume you can't supertask. (Score:1, Insightful)
As a bicyclist, I am ready to go vigilante [dirtnail.com] on some of the drivers I see on the road regularly. Just this morning, as I was about to turn left on my way to work, a woman barreling over a hill in a 30MPH zone while going at least 40MPH was holding up an iPhone directly in the center of her field of vision, and I think she may have actually been texting on it. I sure hope that not only was she one of these so-called "supertaskers," but that she could also react well to things she happens to see in her peripheral vision. So long as you do not plow into me from behind, I can usually take care of myself (although I have seen a motorist stray all the way into the bike lane and almost off the road once), but what especially irked me was the fact that she had just passed right by an elementary school.
I consider myself to be capable of multitasking fairly well. I do not know whether I am a "supertasker," but I have seen enough crazy things on the road in my lifetime that I always make certain that my attention is fully devoted to the road whenever I am behind the wheel. Whatever time I think I may be saving by refusing to make phone calls or read texts while driving is not worth the risk of ruining someone else's life.
Re:Self-correcting problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Self-correcting problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I haven't gotten into an accident yet (Score:5, Insightful)
This was probably bait but I took it.
If you honestly believe you have a system for using the phone safely while driving you are far dumber than you think you are. While your attention is on the phone at any time your attention is not fully on anything else. Thus you loose situational awareness. Thus when you return your attention to driving your brain has to process a huge chunk of information to catch up. If you are task flipping your brain will start to devalue lesser pieces of information.
For example a kid riding a bike on a side walk. You will devalue that in your brain in order to concentrate vehicles on the road. You won't have a full picture of what the kid was doing previously. For example he could have show previously that he had poor balance and wobbled a lot. You didn't see it because you were texting. All of a sudden this kid falls onto the road in front of you. Your fine but now the kid is in hospital. Technically it was the kids fault but really it was your dumb ass brain that was at fault. You did not have a full situational aware that you would have easily had, had you just kept your eyes on the task of driving.
Using a phone while driving is dangerous period.
Re:Self-correcting problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong, partially. When one person runs into another person, the person getting hit tends to sustain more damage, especially since the person doing the hitting usually does it with the front end of their car, and the person getting hit frequently gets hit somewhere other than the front end, such as in the door. This is very common at intersections when some moron runs a red light. Doors don't offer much protection against impact compared to the front end of a car.
Secondly, if the drunk/texter runs into a pedestrian or cyclist or motorcyclist, again the drunk is going to get away injury-free while the innocent party is screwed.
Not "anyone" just most people. (Score:3, Insightful)
The article you are responding to clearly states that 1 in 40 people who engage in these activities are not any more dangerous while doing it.
Re:I dislike the legislative approach (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Are they just worse drivers to begin with? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't care about relative performance. How well do these supertaskers driving wile focused compare with a normaltasker while focused, and how good are they compared to some standard of safe? In other words, the supertaskers might be great at normal and distracted driving, or really lousy at both.
And let's just say that these supertaskers are great in both situations. What if they found that 1 in 1000 could drive safely with eyes closed, or while sleeping? That shouldn't be grounds for making such a thing legal. Ultimately what matters is that safety is at an acceptable level, however that is achieved.
Re:Are they just worse drivers to begin with? (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with calling some people "supertaskers" is that it implies a timeless ability, but testing for a timeless ability requires repeating the tests at regular time intervals over an extended period of time. And even then you can only claim "supertasking" as a transient ability.
It's bad science to impose a preconceived notion directly in the terminology. It's better to just call them statistical outliers, and to ask how many of those are expected?
For example, you might get somebody who is really bad at multitasking, but on the day of the test everything works just right. There's green lights, few cars on the road, and they look like supertaskers. Whereas the next day, there might be a string of red lights and a jaywalker and everything goes wrong. The same "supertasker" would be labeled an "undertasker" if the test was done a day later. Even something as simple as whether they had cereal for breakfast, or they are going through an extended divorce could have a nontrivial effect.
The expected variation in external inputs is what causes an expected number of people to lie at the extremes of the distribution. With a normal distribution, about 5% (ie 10 people out of 200) are at least 2 standard deviations off the mean. That's the extra push that could turn a negative effect into a positive one for those people.
Re:Justification (Score:1, Insightful)
Either way, Darwin's going to get his way. He will decide whose genetic material will live on in the afterlife and whose genetic material will slowly sink to the fiery pits at the center of the Earth. There is no salvation - no repentance for dying in sin. If you're in the passenger seat remember "Ephesians 5:3-11 warns against keeping company with the immoral because the reputation as well as the sin rubs off on you." http://www.christadelphiancare.net/fellowship/GBA_for.htm, potentially even for riding not with these heathen, but simply for failing to avoid them.
Re:Self-correcting problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not "anyone" just most people. (Score:5, Insightful)
The article you are responding to clearly states that 1 in 40 people who engage in these activities are not any more dangerous while doing it.
Based on 5 outliers in a sample of only 200, in a study whose methodology has not yet been published but possibly observing only voice calls using hands-free systems, and ignoring the complete lack of previous support for this theory from a diverse body of evidence gathered over quite a few years now into both road safety and cognitive theory.
I think I'll wait until the jury is back before I start jumping to any conclusions on this one.
Re:what to do about it? (Score:3, Insightful)
>Would sending photos to police help?
I'd think knowing a driver's insurance company and being able to send photos of risky behavior to them would be more effective than the cops. Money is a pretty powerful motive.
Re:Self-correcting problem (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't drive as if every vehicle approaching on a side street might fail to stop. I was clobbered by a young inexperienced driver who ran a red light. Saw him, too, and didn't like how fast he was coming up to the light, so I moved away one lane and slowed a little. I was thinking he might not be able to quite stop. Instead, he sped up, running the light, and put himself squarely in front of me. If I'd thought of that possibility, I might have been ready for it and able to avoid him. Might. On the other hand, had I not slowed a little, he might have nailed me in the side, and I might be dead. For his part, he claimed he never saw the light, and there's a little something to that-- it's the sort of light that while quite visible physically, is not so mentally visible. Drivers are conditioned to expect lights in that kind of setting to be green when they approach.
For the first week after returning to the road, I was cringing at every approaching vehicle. And discovering that there were always approaching vehicles. You can't drive like that. It's stressful and exhausting, and you still won't see everything. You've got to play the very high odds that others will not make a boneheaded mistake like that, and that if they do, your car will protect you well enough that you aren't seriously hurt.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)