From a Driver’s Permit to a Habitual Practice: A Science-based Approach to Driver Education

I was six. My younger brother and I were strapped into the backseat of our family’s royal blue Chevrolet Blazer. It all happened so quickly that I thought I was dreaming. A random driver takes a stop sign and t-bones that Blazer my mother was driving. Mom turned to us, shaking our legs while yelling if we were okay, and I knew that this was no dream but her waking nightmare. Luckily for us three, beyond the fright and a totaled car, we were grateful to be alive, and to get to go home. That memory must now be woven into my subconscious because I get irate at the sight or sound of reckless drivers. Be it the daily “rolling stops” I see in front of my house, or the feverish honking I hear from drivers as they exit an alleyway, these and other acts of irresponsible driving put me on edge. Yet, I know I can take steps to both be a better and safer driver while encouraging others to do the same. If every day I see a stop sign treated as a suggestion rather than a mandate, I can turn those feelings of frustration into fuel that inspires my own research as a budding economist. As an aspiring social scientist, I look to applied research to learn the science of decision-making, and in the case of driving, how drivers can make safe decisions their default choice.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports that, “every day, about seven teens aged 13–19 died due to motor vehicle crashes, and hundreds more were injured, (CDC). Most striking, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that the most at-risk to suffer a tragic accident are the newly licensed drivers on the road, “teen drivers age [16-19] are nearly three times as likely as drivers aged 20 or older to be in a fatal crash” (IIHS). In considering the opportunity to improve road safety, decrease tragic accidents, and encourage good driving habits, drivers education serves a critically important role in accomplishing those objectives for all, and especially for those most at risk of a tragic accident. Ideally, drivers education would include the baseline content about “the rules of the road” while ensuring students are afforded an instructor that serves as a role model for facilitating the skills of responsible driving. Yet, to ensure that quality content and instruction generates its intended impact, the driver’s education experience should teach new and novice drivers the science of developing good driving habits. There exist many thoughtful and well-intentioned steps to help reduce the number of deaths related to driving. Examples are many and include rewards like discounted automobile insurance for safe drivers or penalties like speeding tickets for reckless drivers. Yet, in considering the current steps taken and the scale of tragic automobile accidents impacting older teenagers, I look to behavioral science for insights and inspiration for a possible new direction in creating a cohort of safer drivers.

The psychologist Wendy Wood and her three decades of original research provide a helpful framework for moving beyond the challenge of incentivizing safe (good) driving and penalizing reckless (bad) driving, by focusing on the teaching and learning of habitual driving. That is, regardless of a drivers’ designation as a “good” or “bad” driver, both of those drivers’ habits were formed in a similar manner. So, instead of attempting to solely reward the good driver’s while penalizing the bad, the educational focus should be on developing a habitual approach to driving that defaults to safety upon being in the driver’s seat.

Professor Wood’s framework for habit formation is based on three underlying elements informing the formation of any habit, be it good or bad. Those three elements are context, repetition, and reward. All three are critical and work in a cycle to shape a learner’s unconscious mind, and ultimately, the learner executes a habit on “auto-pilot” when cued. Of the three elements, I believe the context element as being a major opportunity for all Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) education facilities to improve their programming while sharing and learning from other regions about their approach to teaching safe habitual driving. DMV education and training programs can prove to be key influencers in reducing collisions if these programs receive the adequate support to transform their programming to become “more empirically based, addressing critical age and experience related factors,” (Mayhew & Simpson). In the short term, however, an immediate course of action by DMVs across the country to promote and ensure educational programming aligns to the science of habit formation may tip the scale in everyone’s favor for future cohorts of drivers that choose safety each and every time they are in the driver’s seat.

References

“Fatality Facts 2019: Teenagers.” IIHS, The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/teenagers.

“Rules of the Road, Traffic Safety.” Rules of the Road/Traffic Safety, State of Illinois, Sept. 2019, www.cyberdriveillinois.com/publications/motorist/rorts.html.

“Teen Drivers: Get the Facts.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 18 Nov. 2020, www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/teen_drivers/teendrivers_factsheet.html.

Wood, Wendy. Good Habits, Bad Habits: the Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick. First Edition ed., Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.

Mayhew DR, Simpson HM. The safety value of driver education an training Injury Prevention 2002;8:ii3-ii8.