Emotional Maturity, Personal Responsibility, and Practice, Prevent Automobile Deaths

Emotional Maturity, Personal Responsibility, and Practice, Prevent Automobile Deaths

While I have never personally been in a car accident, I have witnessed other people driving irresponsibly. Texting while driving is perhaps one of the biggest problems I have seen, but it is certainly not the only one. The issue here is that smart phones are “cool,” and so is driving, and no one calls it “uncool” to do both at the same time. Too few people see this as a problem.

Drivers ed plays a very important role in developing the skills of a good driver. In particular, teaching student drivers to be “defensive drivers.” Teaching defensive driving educates student drivers with the concept that not only are they responsible for their own actions, but that they must be prepared to deal with (or be responsible for) the actions of other drivers as well. Teaching this concept alone likely reduces driving fatalities by allowing responsible drivers to compensate to some degree for irresponsible ones. The more aware and alert drivers there are on the road, the fewer accidents that will occur.

However, teaching defensive driving alone is not sufficient.

There is a reason car insurance rates decline at age 25; it is the same reason rental car companies will only rent to those 25 and older. Younger drivers consistently cause more car crashes than any other age group. Part of that reason is experience and practice. More experienced drivers are less likely to cause car accidents, and are likely more able to avoid them. However, simple experience is only part of the story. Perhaps the more important issue is that the pre-frontal cortex of the human brain does not become fully mature until age 25. There is ample neurological and behavioral data to support that drivers under 25 years of age are more likely to engage in irresponsible and dangerous behavior.

The solutions to these problems are twofold:

First, providing young drivers with opportunities to practice, practice, practice, in safe, controlled environments, will help them to develop the skills and confidence to be safer drivers. Such opportunities for practice are often not available to many.

More hands on driving courses would be very helpful to preventing driving deaths. Various types of incentives could be provided (if necessary) to encourage participation. However, for many young drivers, providing access to such opportunities is likely enough incentive.

Second, the likely best way to get young student drivers to drive more responsibly is to create a general culture and education system that promotes, nurtures and develops a generalized psychology of emotional maturity and responsibility. If young drivers have a poor sense of personal responsibility and emotional maturity in general, it will likely be futile to try to convince them to suddenly behave responsibly when they get in the driver’s seat of an automobile.

Young people tend to learn from and mimic those they idolize or look up to. So as a culture we need to encourage adults and public figures to behave in more mature, conscious, and responsible ways, so that younger people looking up to them learn and mimic better behaviors. Unfortunately, the current popular culture in the US tends to do the exact opposite: promote and idolize immature, unaware, irresponsible culture. If we want this to change, we need to change the incentive structures in place, by not supporting people who engage in such poor behaviors.

Similarly, we all need to act as role models (myself included), to behave in more mature and responsible ways ourselves. Leading by example not only sets an example for behavior, but it creates peer pressure for others to follow. It’s easy for everyone to go along with bad behaviors until one person chooses something different. Once someone chooses differently, choosing dangerous behaviors becomes a lot more difficult, because it forces the choice to become more of a conscious choice rather than an automatic one. While I’m sure I’m not perfect in my driving habits, the steps I take are many. I always wear my seatbelt, always check my mirrors, have full attention on the road, and if youngsters are in the car, I make sure to lead by being a good example of what an alert and undistracted driver is like.

In the end, there is no one “silver bullet” that is going to change behaviors that reduce the number of automobile related deaths. But there are certainly some key ways in which we can all contribute to help reduce the problem.