"Everyone does it"

Look around at the next red light. The driver alongside, head down, thumb going. The one behind, lit face. It isn't just you and it isn't a few people, and a habit that common can't be as bad as they say, or the roads would be a wreck.

The first half of that is true. Dingus and colleagues' cameras found drivers were doing something distracting, of any kind, in just over half of the ordinary driving samples they looked at. Handheld phone use alone took up more than six per cent of driving time, and while it was happening the crash risk was 3.6 times ordinary driving. Atchley's seventy per cent of young drivers starting texts is the same picture from a survey. Everyone does do it, more or less.

The second half doesn't follow. The roads aren't a wreck because crashes are rare even when the risk is multiplied, which was chapter 6. And the norm isn't a defence, because the norm is what the crash figures are made of. Dingus found distraction present in sixty-eight per cent of the nine hundred and five crashes his cameras caught. The people in those cars were also people who'd looked around at the lights and seen everyone doing it.

What the norm does do, and this is where it gets interesting, is run the habit. Nemme and White found that what a driver's friends and peers did predicted their intention to text, over and above their own attitude. If everyone in your car does it, you'll do it. If your passengers would say something, you'll do it less. That's not an argument that everyone's wrong. It's an observation that the norm is a lever, and it's currently pulling the wrong way.

Which gives you something to do with it. You're one of the everyone. When you don't peek, the person in the passenger seat notices, and the child in the back notices, and the norm in your car shifts by one. Chapter 22 comes back to this, for the case where you're the passenger and the driver's the one with the phone on their knee.