To get people to put down their phones while driving, make it a game, Penn study suggests

Dr. Kit Delgado is the faculty director of the Nudge Unit at Penn Medicine, a group of researchers looking for ways to get people to make good choices for their health. So Delgado wondered if there was a way to convince people to put the phone down while driving. He and colleagues have now set out to do just that.

The researchers recently released new study results showing that combining “do the right thing” motivation, positive reinforcement and small financial rewards in a competitive game format ultimately reduced phone use while driving by as much as 28%.

“We want to make it easy to do the right thing,” Delgado said. “And people really love competitions and leaderboards, so we thought that something like that, in ‘gamifying’ this, would be a way of providing a social incentive without necessarily having to add extra [reward] money.”