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Driving Under the Influence of Friends is Risky for Teens
Teen drivers are far more likely die in car accidents when they drive with friends. According to a study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, a teen driver's risk of death per mile driven increases by 44% with one teen passenger in the car and quadruples with three or more teen passengers. As a result, many states now have laws limiting the number of passengers allowed in a car with a teen driver. Crash data has long shown that driving with peers dramatically increases the odds of fatal crashes for teens, particularly males, but researchers have been unable to pinpoint exactly why some teens’ driving behavior spins out of control in the presence of their friends.
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Analysis of Social Cognition Predicts Dangerous Drivers
A team of psychological scientists in the Czech Republic is looking at the brains of bad drivers to understand why some of us flout the rules--putting others at risk of serious injury or death--while the rest of us abide by them. In a recent study published in the journal NeuroImage, lead author Jana Zelinková of the Central European Institute of Technology found that while watching videos on traffic safety, people with a history of dangerous driving show relatively less activation in brain areas associated with social cognition and empathy compared to their law-abiding counterparts.
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Researchers Investigate Why Cyclists Run Red Lights
Much like motorists, cyclists don’t always obey traffic laws. From Melbourne to New York City, urban dwellers have grumbled about encounters with bicyclists who brazenly zip straight through red lights without even a glance at oncoming traffic or pedestrians in the crosswalk. But while risky behavior in motorists has been extensively studied, relatively little research has been published on similar behavior for bicyclists.
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Unraveling Mysteries of Safe Steering with Behavioral Science
We may take it for granted, but exactly how we steer a car has remained a mystery to researchers for nearly 70 years. The prevailing theory for how we steer towards a target was initially developed by British researcher Arnold Tustin in 1947. Tustin was a pioneer in the engineering field of control theory which focuses on the interactions between humans and complex machines.
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Using Science to Help Teach Teens Safe Driving Skills
Young drivers have a reputation for being among the most dangerous on the road for good reason; according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), teen drivers, per mile driven, are nearly three times more likely than drivers older than 20 to be in a fatal crash, particularly in the first few months after receiving their license. This week at the Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., psychological scientists presented innovative research on how we learn to transition from accident-prone novices to safer drivers as we gain experience behind the wheel. “The over representation of novice drivers in road accidents across the world is consistent.
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Preventing Road Accidents Before They Can Happen
Perceptual errors, when a driver looks but fails to register pedestrians or other vehicles, are one of the leading causes of car accidents. Sometimes called “looked-but-failed-to-see” accidents, because a driver fails to notice another vehicle even though they looked in the right direction. These errors are particularly common and dangerous in accidents involving bicycles and motorcycles. On the road, drivers face many simultaneous demands on their attention: pedestrians, traffic light changes, other cars, and following GPS directions. It’s impossible for a driver to focus their full attention on all of these events at once.
