Our Research Makes Roads Safer
Issue
Everyone wants to keep our roads safe. How can we achieve that? Helping drivers buckle up and put their phones down. Recent estimates show that around 3,300 people are killed by distracted driving annually. In addition, the National Highway Safety Administration says 2,549 additional lives could have been saved in 2017 if everyone had used their seatbelt.
Results
CHIBE researchers published research in 2025 demonstrating how behavioral economics tools can help increase seatbelt use and reduce phone use while driving.
Dr. Kit 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.
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 Dr. Jeffrey Ebert (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.
This research was published on the AAA website.
Dr. Ebert and colleagues also published a paper in 2025 finding that a modest financial incentive tied to maintaining “streaks” of seatbelt use led to sustained seatbelt wearing.
In the study of around 1,100 General Motors-connected drivers, researchers found that drivers were 26% less likely to drive unbuckled when they were promised a share of $125 weekly prize money for maintaining a streak of always buckling up. The weekly $125 prizes were divided among drivers who maintained their perfect streak.
In a follow-up period after the intervention ended, there was a 33% reduction in unbuckled trips, indicating that the habit persisted.