5 Ways Behavioral Economics Can Help Promote Safe Driving

Frequent rewards and feedback can spur behavior change in drivers and reduce distracted driving.

The average person spends 4 to 5 minutes using their phone in an hour of driving, but it takes only a few seconds to cause a crash. Recent estimates show that around 3,300 people are killed by distracted driving annually.

One field of study — behavioral economics — can be helpful in curbing distracted driving and reducing injuries.

CHIBE Associate Director and Penn Medicine Nudge Unit Director M. Kit Delgado, MD, MS, is an attending physician in the emergency department and frequently sees patients injured from car crashes— many of which could be preventable. His frustration with these avoidable incidents led him to dive into behavioral economics to learn why people deviate from rational behavior and keep doing things they know they shouldn’t be doing.

Dr. Delgado and his research team have been using “smartphone telematics” (technology used for collecting driving data) to look at distracted driving and testing various interventions such as feedback, social comparisons, financial incentives, and more to reduce phone usage while driving. He has also partnered with insurance companies to look at behavior change at scale.

Recently, Dr. Delgado and a team of researchers published a paper in JAMA Network Open on feedback and financial incentives to reduce cell phone use while driving and found that behavioral economics insights could help reduce distracted driving by more than 20%.

A second paper by Jeffrey Ebert, PhD (lead author), Dr. Delgado, and colleagues found that a multicomponent behavioral intervention that included gamification and social competition could reduce handheld phone use while driving by 20%, and adding modest incentives could lead to a 28% reduction. And these effects were sustained even after the interventions ended, which means the drivers formed long-lasting habits.

“Given that approximately 60,000 crashes owe to phone use distraction each year, a 28% reduction in the most distracting kind of phone use could prevent 16,000 crashes,” the authors wrote.

These findings suggest that auto insurers could use these techniques to reduce distracted driving at scale and curb crashes.

Learn more about 5 ways behavioral economics principles can be leveraged to encourage safer driving and potentially save lives:

1) Financial incentives

Dr. Delgado and his team partnered with Progressive Insurance® to recruit drivers for a 7-week research study. They monitored their phone use and driving behavior and tested several strategies to help reduce phone usage while driving and compared them with a control group. Here were the interventions they used:

• Social comparison feedback
• A financial incentive of up to $50 at the end of the study if a driver used their phone less than other drivers
• Both social comparison feedback and the $50 incentive
• Social comparison feedback and smaller, weekly incentives of $7.15 if they finished as a top performer for the week, but the incentives were “loss-framed,” meaning that drivers were told to expect the weekly money but would lose it if they did not keep their phone use low. These incentives would also total $50 by the end of the study.
• The same techniques listed above, but the total money they could earn was doubled (weekly payments of up to $14.29, totaling $100 maximum)

In addition to leveraging “loss aversion,” where people are more likely to want to avoid losses than to achieve gains, the research team also made use of the behavioral economics theory of “present bias,” where people often want more immediate, smaller rewards than a bigger lump sum reward later.

“What we know from behavioral economics is that people who frequently engage in their phones while driving pursue short-term rewards that are not as big as long-term rewards,” Dr. Delgado said.

Drivers also could see how much money they were losing over time by not changing their behavior, which was an idea stemming from the behavioral economics insight of “regret aversion.” And lastly, the team also used the “fresh-start effect” and told drivers who did not finish as a top performer that they got a “fresh start” to earn money the next week.

They found that using the loss-framed, more frequent financial incentives led to a 21% decrease in drivers’ handheld phone use. Interestingly, they also discovered that doubling the incentive amount did not lead to greater behavior change.

2) Environmental strategies and planning

When the financial incentives were removed, most drivers tended to revert to their old behavior, but the research team contacted the drivers who had sustained behavior change to see what strategies worked for them. Some drivers bought a phone mount to help them go hands-free, others turned on “Do not disturb” while driving, others made a plan to commit to not using their phone, and some found that putting their phone in the glove compartment helped.

So, the research team encouraged the insurance company to mail out phone mounts and told drivers to complete a commitment exercise to reduce their phone use while driving and conducted a second study.

Gamification and social comparisons

In this second study, in addition to the phone mounts and the commitment exercise, one group also participated in a game and social competition and received financial incentives to reduce their phone use. 

The drivers were randomized to a weekly competition where they were grouped with people from across the country who used their phone about the same amount as they did. They competed to see who could reduce their phone use the most. Drivers could also split a pot of money with any drivers who completed their goals over the course of 7 weeks.

The group of participants who received all these interventions saw a 28% decrease in their distracted driving compared with the control group. In addition, those who received the incentives and also another group that did not receive incentives but did have performance feedback continued to have reduced handheld phone use after the feedback and incentives ended.

“We care very much about how we stack up to people like us,” he said. “Once you see ‘I’m using my phone way more than others’ that creates motivation that’s sustainable.”

Goal setting

Setting attainable, incremental goals can help drivers cut back on their distracted driving too.

“It’s like exercise,” Dr. Delgado said. “You’re not going to all of a sudden go from walking a few blocks a day to running a marathon the next week.”

If a driver is spending 8 minutes an hour on their phone while driving, the research team found the most success suggesting that the driver try reducing phone use by 10% at first. Once they can see that they can make a little bit of progress, they are more likely to achieve that goal.

“Creating incremental change in goals is much more effective than saying: ‘Don’t use your phone at all,’” he said.

Defaults

One area for advocacy work is campaigning for “Do not disturb” to be a default feature while driving instead of an opt-in feature. Dr. Delgado and his team conducted pilot research showing that when you default “Do not disturb” while driving, it significantly reduces phone distraction. He suggested that a coalition of insurers and traffic safety professionals could help push phone companies to make this change.

“Willpower is weak,” Dr. Delgado concluded. “Think about how you can design your life, your system, your driving experience” so you’re less likely to pick up your phone while driving.

Dr. Delgado recently gave a talk on this subject at the 2024 Lifesavers Conference on Roadway Safety. It was livestreamed as a special episode of the Travelers Institute’s Wednesdays with Woodward webinar series. Watch the video here.

He has also been invited to share his insights from this research at the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration Distraction Action Forum at the US Department of Transportation in Washington, DC, on August 28, 2024.