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A Randomized Field Trial of Smartphone-Based Feedback Designed to Encourage Safe Driving
Globally, motor vehicle crashes result in 1.2 million deaths and as many as 50 million non-fatal injuries each year. Many crashes can be prevented by reducing risky driving behaviors such as speeding, hard braking, rapid acceleration, and handheld phone use. Innovations in smartphone telematics enable these behaviors to be measured, paving the way for scalable behavioral interventions to help individuals improve their driver safety. This may already be happening: a growing number of U.S. drivers are enrolled in usage-based insurance (UBI) programs that price policies according to smartphone-measured risky driving behaviors. These programs provide feedback and incentives that should, in theory, lead to safer driving. However, this proposition has not been rigorously tested. Moreover, behavioral science would suggest that the way UBI feedback is typically delivered—multiple behaviors at once, without specific incremental goals or choice over what to focus on—is suboptimal. The primary goal of the present research was to experimentally test whether providing feedback and incentives typical of UBI improves driver safety, and whether greater improvements are possible by assigning or allowing drivers to choose more focused goals.
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