"I'm a good driver, it's the others"

You probably are a good driver. Most people who've driven for fifteen years without hitting anything are, in the ordinary sense. And the belief that follows is that good driving covers the peek. You've got the reactions, the anticipation, the sense of the road, and a less good driver shouldn't look at their phone, but you can afford it.

In 1981 Ola Svenson asked drivers to rate their own skill and safety against the other people in the room, and most of them put themselves above the middle, which can't be true of most people. The original paper's abstract isn't available to me, so I'm citing it through Lina Koppel and colleagues, who repeated the study in 2023 with just over twelve hundred people and a preregistered plan. They got the same result. The majority rated both their skill and their safety as above average, on every scale they tried. This is called the better-than-average effect and it turns up in most things people are asked to rate themselves on. Driving is the classic case.

So the belief that your skill covers it is one that most drivers hold, including the ones it isn't true of, and you can't tell from the inside which group you're in. But there's a more specific finding, and it's worse. Sanbonmatsu, Strayer and colleagues gave university students a test of actual ability to do two things at once, and asked them how much they did it in daily life and how good they thought they were. The people who did the most of it, including the ones who reported the most phone use while driving, scored worst on the test. And their estimate of their own ability was the most inflated. The people most likely to look at the phone in the car were the people least able to afford it and most sure they could.

That's one study of students and I don't want to lean on it harder than it can take. But put it next to Svenson and the picture is consistent. The feeling that you're the exception isn't evidence that you are. It's the feeling everyone has, and it's strongest in the people who peek most.

There's one more thing about good drivers. Being good at driving is being good at the thing you're doing when your eyes are on the road. It's not a reserve that keeps working when they aren't. Nobody's reactions cover the twenty-seven metres they didn't see.