Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety recruited 1,449 drivers through social media ads between January and March 2024.
In the nationwide study, weekly text messages about driving habits plus cash incentives successfully reduced speeding, hard braking, and rapid acceleration by double-digit percentages. Handheld phone use while driving? Completely unchanged. Drivers kept their phones in hand just as much as people who received no feedback or money at all.
Why would speeding respond to incentives while phone use doesn’t? Jeffrey Ebert, the study’s lead author at Penn, suspects the scoring system shares some blame. Participants saw their “driver focus” score (the opposite of phone use) averaged 93 out of 100, while their scores for speeding, braking, and acceleration hovered in the 60s and 70s. That high score may have given people “the false impression” their phone use wasn’t really a problem, even though they were spending nearly four minutes of every hour driving with a phone in hand.