Cognitive Biases, Attitudes, and Beliefs of Teenagers and Parents Toward Practice Driving, Vehicle Choice, and Safety Technology

Teenagers in the United States are at the highest risk of crash during the first year of independent driving. Graduated driver licensing (GDL) policies, vehicle choice, and safety technologies all have an impact on teenager safety, yet more needs to be understood about parent and teenager attitudes and beliefs that affect the choices and decisions surrounding these issues. We conducted six focus groups with teenagers enrolled in a driver education program and their parents. A qualitative thematic analysis was undertaken of the responses of these individuals directly experiencing GDL policies and selecting vehicles for the teenagers to drive. We found parents believed there was a high likelihood teenage drivers would crash and were concerned about the associated financial costs. Parents preferred visual cues for determining vehicle safety and had concerns for the impact of safety technologies on teenager driving skills. Teenagers and parents felt that logging 60 h was a measure of the character of a driver rather than an opportunity for mastering driving skills. There was a debate balancing the intrusiveness with the convenience of recording driving through smartphone applications. Teenagers wanted to learn to drive for independence, but parents did not observe actions related to these desires. Attitudes and beliefs about which vehicles were safest were heavily influenced by personal experiences and perceptions, rather than quantitative evidence, with examples of availability-, substitution-, and outcome cognitive biases. By understanding the influence of cognitive biases on driving safety decisions, community-based educational outreach programs could more effectively improve teenager driver safety.