Sunday, November 11, 2007
Sociology
Driving and Texting
Driver distraction plays a role in nearly 80 percent of auto accidents. Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly think that text-messaging while driving ought to be outlawed. But more than half of those same Americans say they do, in fact, text-message while driving."Sociologists call it pluralistic ignorance," Kevin Wehr, an assistant professor of sociology at California State University-Sacramento told McClatchy Newspapers recently. "It's this concept where reality applies to everybody but me. We justify things because we think we're better or different from other people. But, of course, we are not better than others. We are just as bad as the next folk.
''The American credo: Do as we say, not as we do.
This text is fully republished from this blog.
As it is said here scientists called this phenomenon PLURALISTIC IGNORANCE. That means that we suppose to be better than the other people. This is no fully true. The problem is that we do our text messaging basically always when we feel the need, and mostly nothing happens. Let’s out of 100 messages we have problems only in one single case, and mostly we can master the problem of distraction. The problem is that the police, journalist, doctors, judges only see the cases when it really went wrong, when really some car accident was caused by the distraction of writing some text message. So it would be like saying that it must be prohibited to fly with an airplane because there are possibilities of a crash and death. Well, as we all well-know, such accidents in air traffic do happen, they do happen in any human activity, the problem are the results, and the simple statistics.
In order to be able to say ho really dangerous the text messaging while driving is we would have to know the total number of all such messages written while driving and compare this number with the number of accidents really caused by this phenomenon, which means we would have to be able to exclude all car accidents where the driver tries only to make an excuse of his distraction by writing such message in a hope he will be excused or not handled so severely. And exactly this might be quite a problem, not that it would not be possible, but in any case of car accident where the driver explains his false driving by typing a message while driving this would have to be checked upon. Police officers would have to try to set up a time framework of accident and try to prove that it really happened due to writing the text message.
If a person has text-messaged say 500 times and nothing happened, not even the slightest distraction, then such a person receives 500 times appositive signal that this is ok and that this activity can be done because it is absolutely not dangerous. This is the problem of repetition of signals. I deal with these in my idea of MLM, multi-level memory. It is actually a training, like basketball, football or whatever other training needed for some human activity, as music playing, bicycle riding, horse riding , swimming, painting, speaking and studying foreign languages etc.
My basic idea of this notion is that what matters is just only the number of repetitions of some activity, which means statistics, to learn some activity properly and gain positive feedback on doing so. The more you do it and the more times it went ok, the more secure you will be and in car you are running the danger of making a mistake, a mistake that sometimes causes only heart beat, but sometimes heart still stand.
Second this is really a good example for sociology, a science that deals with the systems of interactions of humans among other humans, in their informational environment. The same is valid for ethology that is a science dealing with the same task in animals and not in humans.
Driver distraction plays a role in nearly 80 percent of auto accidents. Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly think that text-messaging while driving ought to be outlawed. But more than half of those same Americans say they do, in fact, text-message while driving."Sociologists call it pluralistic ignorance," Kevin Wehr, an assistant professor of sociology at California State University-Sacramento told McClatchy Newspapers recently. "It's this concept where reality applies to everybody but me. We justify things because we think we're better or different from other people. But, of course, we are not better than others. We are just as bad as the next folk.
''The American credo: Do as we say, not as we do.
This text is fully republished from this blog.
As it is said here scientists called this phenomenon PLURALISTIC IGNORANCE. That means that we suppose to be better than the other people. This is no fully true. The problem is that we do our text messaging basically always when we feel the need, and mostly nothing happens. Let’s out of 100 messages we have problems only in one single case, and mostly we can master the problem of distraction. The problem is that the police, journalist, doctors, judges only see the cases when it really went wrong, when really some car accident was caused by the distraction of writing some text message. So it would be like saying that it must be prohibited to fly with an airplane because there are possibilities of a crash and death. Well, as we all well-know, such accidents in air traffic do happen, they do happen in any human activity, the problem are the results, and the simple statistics.
In order to be able to say ho really dangerous the text messaging while driving is we would have to know the total number of all such messages written while driving and compare this number with the number of accidents really caused by this phenomenon, which means we would have to be able to exclude all car accidents where the driver tries only to make an excuse of his distraction by writing such message in a hope he will be excused or not handled so severely. And exactly this might be quite a problem, not that it would not be possible, but in any case of car accident where the driver explains his false driving by typing a message while driving this would have to be checked upon. Police officers would have to try to set up a time framework of accident and try to prove that it really happened due to writing the text message.
If a person has text-messaged say 500 times and nothing happened, not even the slightest distraction, then such a person receives 500 times appositive signal that this is ok and that this activity can be done because it is absolutely not dangerous. This is the problem of repetition of signals. I deal with these in my idea of MLM, multi-level memory. It is actually a training, like basketball, football or whatever other training needed for some human activity, as music playing, bicycle riding, horse riding , swimming, painting, speaking and studying foreign languages etc.
My basic idea of this notion is that what matters is just only the number of repetitions of some activity, which means statistics, to learn some activity properly and gain positive feedback on doing so. The more you do it and the more times it went ok, the more secure you will be and in car you are running the danger of making a mistake, a mistake that sometimes causes only heart beat, but sometimes heart still stand.
Second this is really a good example for sociology, a science that deals with the systems of interactions of humans among other humans, in their informational environment. The same is valid for ethology that is a science dealing with the same task in animals and not in humans.
# posted by Dalibor @ 9:31 AM 
