Attitudes to drunk driving have changed our behavior. So it's routine now: the designated driver, the understanding that you won't let your friends, colleagues, spouses drive home drunk. If they try, you stop them. You certainly don't get in the car with them.
But the other day I was in a car, with my daughter, being driven by a friend who, because the journey was long, fitted in a conference call. I sat frozen in my seat. What could I do? Insist on getting out? We were in the middle of nowhere. I sat, silent and afraid, wondering at the danger we were in. To this day I'm not sure what silenced me more: practical difficulties or simple fear of embarrassment.
My problem was that I'd just written a chapter in my new book, Willful Blindness, which is all about how, and why, we ignore the obvious. In what sounds like a fun piece of research, Frank Drews at the University of Utah divided 40 students into three teams. The first team operated a driving simulator; the second drove on the simulator while talking on a mobile phone. The third bunch got to operate the simulator after drinking enough vodka to take their blood alcohol over the limit. The team using the mobile phones had more rear-end collisions and their braking time was slower. Drews and his colleagues concluded that the drivers using phones didn't have enough cognitive capacity to devote to their driving. (And no, hands-free sets make no difference.)
We don't like to admit it, but the brain has hard limits to what it can take in. A little like bandwidth, when there's too much going on, some data slows down and some gets lost. That's when you make mistakes.
In the end, my journey ended safely, with no damage to body or friendship. And now, any time I call someone and find them driving, I arrange to call back. But I'm left wondering: why is fear of embarrassment so powerful that it leaves us and our children in danger?
Is there any evidence that any one of these is more dangerous than another and if not then are they all dangerous? Perhaps we should either drive alone or in silence. Having said that it would kill me anyway on really long 4 hour journeys to drive in silence I am sure I would fall asleep.
Embarrassment can and does kill us, and in far more serious venues than just our vehicles.
For example, psychosocial research on 'treatment-seeking delay' out of Oregon Health & Science University, published in The American Journal of Critical Care, identified six common patterns of behaviour between the time women first know they are experiencing serious heart attack symptoms and the time when they actually go for help.
These six behaviour patterns include what researchers call "Knowing and Waiting" (women decided that they needed help, but delayed seeking treatment because they did not want to disturb others ) and "Minimizing" ( women tried to ignore their symptoms or hoped the symptoms would go away, and did not recognize that their symptoms were heart- related). Such treatment-seeking delay can result in deadly outcomes for women. More at "Knowing And Going: Act Fast When Heart Attack Symptoms Hit" at: http://myheartsisters.org/2009/05/22/know-and-go-during-heart-attack/
It works great in a car too. If you can't abide by those priorities, don't call. If you can, then there's no problem.
It may need an external safety assessor to make the call, given the tendency for the ill-trained, ill-tested and poorly-aware to travel at 70mph speeds near the ground. While you sat cowering, did you see any problems with the driver's attention?
It would be interesting to see how immersive the simulator from your referenced experiments was. Performance in simulators can depart from that in real life if they are treated as only being a game. I suspect that if the trainers had threatened the subjects with a $25 fine for crashing the simulator, everyone would have done better.
I don't want to understate the dangers of distraction; however, a large fraction of the population should be capable of talking safely while driving. If they genuinely can't manage a conversation while driving safely, then they probably shouldn't be driving - similar redirection of focus is required to pay appropriate attention to the appearance of bad weather, road hazards, mechanical problems etc.
People think they can multitask even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary.