Hands-free kits as dangerous as driving with cellphone

Anecdotally, there seems to be a rise in the number of people using their cellphone as they drive.

Certainly, drivers aren’t being laid low by enforcement as, say, they are in Auckland where 43,169 bus lane fines have been issued over the past 12 months in a stunning example of nanny state (or should I say nanny council) gone wild.

But does it matter whether you use a legal hands-free kit or an illegal cellphone when you’re behind the wheel?

I’m currently reading The Invisible Gorilla, written by two Harvard-trained psychology professors: Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons.

The pair are familiar to psychology students worldwide for the experiment of the book’s title. It saw a group of people asked to watch a video of a basketball game, and count the number of passes made by one of the two teams. Concentrating on this task, more than half the respondents missed an actor dressed as a gorilla who walked onto centre court mid-way through the clip, for nine seconds (and a later test, tracking specific eye movement, found the missers were just as likely to have stared directly at the gorilla as the noticers).

Their point - whether watching sport, driving, checking X-rays or chasing crims - people often miss something purely because their brain is not expecting to see it.

The bad bit is that most people don’t realise this, making them overconfident in their cognitive skills, and their expectations of others.

Chabris and Simons don’t recommend making any type of phone call as you drive.

But they do claim that making a call with a cellphone to your ear is not more dangerous than using a hands-free kit - in fact it’s probably less so (keep reading).

The physical act of driving with a cellphone does not tax anyone mentally.

“The problem isn’t with our eyes or our hands. We can drive just fine with one hand on the wheel, and we can look at the road while holding a phone. Indeed, the acts of holding a phone and turning a steering wheel place little demand on our cognitive capacities. These motor-controlled processes are almost entirely automatic and unconscious [for an experienced driver]”, they write.

But the act of talking to someone on the phone adds an element of multi-tasking that does detract from our finite powers of concentration, and ability to see the unexpected (and much more so than talking to a person sitting next to you in a car. On the phone, you feel social pressure to keep up your end of the conversation, while a passenger immediately understands if you have to pause while negotiating an intersection).

This element of distraction is equal whether you’re talking with a cellphone, or on a hands-free kit, tripling your chance of not seeing an unexpected event according to a Yale study.

And here’s the kicker:

“Legislation banning the use of handheld phones might even have the ironic effect of making people more confident they can safely use a hands-free phone when driving,” Chabris and Simons conclude.