Taxpayers spent $1.8 million to study rewards for stopping cellphone use while driving

NEW YORK, July 30 (UPI) -- A new study in which people were paid to stop using cellphones while driving has drawn criticism for spending $1.84 million in federal taxpayers' money.

"Because such a study like this one primarily benefits insurance and tech companies by trying to determine the effectiveness of certain incentives, they should pay for it, not taxpayers," said Jonathan Hofer, a research associate at the Independent Institute, a Libertarian think tank in Oakland, Calif.

Added Tom Schatz , president of Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonprofit taxpayer watchdog in Washington: "There's too much money available in federal agencies if these are the kind of studies they are funding."

For the study, published earlier this month in JAMA Network Open and listing 19 authors, researchers tested whether behavioral interventions and financial incentives can reduce driver distractions stemming from handheld cellphone use -- a major factor in vehicle crashes.

While those crashes and fatalities amount to a huge toll for individuals and society, both in terms of human life and financial repercussions, Hofer said there is a limit as to what financial compensation can accomplish in bridging the gap between dangerous driving and safer habits.

"Perhaps monetarily penalizing distracted drivers would produce even stronger results than positive incentives. If insurance companies could fine drivers for using handheld cellphones, that "would move the needle more," he said.

Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford Medicine in Palo Alto, Calif., recalled that an addiction clinic at which he worked years ago asked patients to provide a urine sample during each visit. It paid them $15 for a "clean" result -- an incentive for curbing addiction.

"Although I see some parallels between methamphetamine use disorder and smartphone addiction, the federal grant money might have been better spent exploring questions related to online psychology, whose answers are much less obvious," said Aboujaoude, who is chief of the Anxiety Disorders Section at Stanford and has long studied the interface better technology and psychology.

"The list of potential topics in desperate need for federal funding is long, and some even cost lives, just like texting while driving," he added, citing worthy issues, such as the connection between online pro-suicide forums and the rising suicide rate, the link between cyberbullying and suicide, the trauma that follows online privacy violations and the online spillover from video game violence.

Schatz noted that study participants stopped using cellphones behind the wheel only while they were compensated. This positive behavioral change did not continue afterward.

High-visibility enforcement in the form of more police patrolling and ticketing would be better alternatives. Media announcements informing the public of these measures also could encourage drivers to put down their phones while driving, Schatz said.

The Federal Highway Administration, an agency within the U.S. Department of Transportation, provided $1.84 million in tax money toward the $2.3 million project, which received contributions from participating organizations.

Researchers said this was one of the largest federally funded research projects to study cellphone use and driving in an effort to curb distractions.

"All things equal, paying someone to do something compared to doing nothing in most cases will encourage them to do it," the study's lead author, Dr. M. Kit Delgado, an assistant professor of emergency medicine and epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia, acknowledged via email.

"What interested us is that auto insurance companies dole out billions of dollars per year in discounts for safe driving, but there's been very little research on how to best leverage those enticements to make people drive safer," said Delgado, who also is associate director of the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics and a senior fellow at the Penn Injury Science Center, which collaborated on the project.

He added that "the insurance market is increasingly offering programs in which customers can opt into having their driving habits monitored so that they can save money or win rewards for safer driving."

Among the largest of these programs is Progressive Snapshot , which provided the mobile application for the study.

In a trial with 2,020 participating auto insurance customers, a Snapchat mobile app administered the intervention across the United States. Of the participants, 68% were female, and the median age was 30.

Customers received an invitation to participate in the study and they were randomly assigned to six study groups, allowing researchers to determine which behavioral strategies would be most effective in decreasing handheld cellphone use while driving.

Strategies included encouraging participants to adopt phone settings that automatically silence notifications while driving, providing feedback on the amount of phone use behind the wheel and awarded financial incentives for staying off their phones.

Researchers said their goal was to develop insights into redesigning safe driving discounts, rewarding safer drivers with lower insurance premiums while protecting them from harm.

Participants who received smartphone-based interventions along with financial incentives reduced handheld phone use while driving by 15% to 21% compared to the control group.

"The average per-participant cost of incentives for the most successful treatment was $26, less than standard auto-insurance discounts for safe driving records," researchers wrote. "Doubling the incentive amount did not yield greater behavior change."

Researchers conducted the study between May 13 and June 30, 2019. They completed their analysis last December.

"The trial concluded right as we were heading into the COVID pandemic," Delgado said in explaining the gap between the research and compiling and publishing the results.

"Our multidisciplinary team in the health system had to drop everything to focus on care innovation to mitigate the pandemic, and so, we placed finalizing the analysis and writing it up on hold until we took care of that emergency."

There is a significant opportunity to further promote safer driving as behavior-based insurance programs continue to expand and innovate, Delgado said.

They "are on the financial hook for distracted driving crashes," he said. "There is a strong business case for sustaining these incentives."