"I only do it when it's safe"

This is the belief that does most of the work, so it's worth taking seriously. You don't peek on a roundabout. You don't peek in the rain with a lorry alongside. You peek when the road is straight and empty and nothing's coming, and you know it's empty because you looked. The safe moment is real, in the sense that some moments are safer than others, and you're choosing them.

The trouble is who's doing the choosing. David Sanbonmatsu, David Strayer and colleagues put drivers in a simulator, some talking on a hands-free phone and some not, and afterwards asked everyone how safely they'd driven. The drivers who weren't on the phone had a fair idea. Their ratings of their own driving lined up with the number of errors they'd actually made. The drivers who'd been on the phone made more errors, which you'd expect, and their ratings of their own driving had no relationship at all to their errors. Being on the phone didn't just make them worse. It took away their ability to tell.

That's the problem with the safe moment. It's judged by the same mind that's about to be partly on the phone, and often by a mind that already is, because the itch arrived before the judgement did. You aren't assessing the road and then deciding. You're wanting to look and then finding the road acceptable.

Paul Atchley and colleagues found something stranger in a survey of three hundred and forty-eight young drivers. When drivers chose to start a text themselves, rather than replying to one or just reading one, they rated the road conditions at the time as safer. The road hadn't changed. The choice had, and the sense of safety followed the choice rather than leading it. The authors put it as behaviour shaping attitude, and I'd put it more plainly. Once you've decided to look, the road agrees with you.

I'm extending both findings here and I should say so. Sanbonmatsu's drivers were talking, not reading, and Atchley's were surveyed, not filmed. But the shape is the same in both, and it fits what you'll have noticed if you're honest. You've never once looked at the phone and thought, this is a bad moment. The moments always seem fine. That isn't because they always are. It's because the part of you that judges has already been recruited.