Why you can’t stop checking your phone - Ideas - The Boston Globe

Excerpt from an overview of habitually dangerous patterns

"It seems clear something powerful is at work, overriding people’s knowledge that what they’re doing behind the wheel is dangerous. To figure out what that something might be, psychology and communications researchers around the world have started studying what exactly is happening in our heads when we reach for a phone in the car. What their research so far suggests is that texting and driving is unlike any public safety issue we’ve dealt with before. It’s not like the judgment error of drinking too much and deciding to drive home anyway; it’s not like neglecting to put on your seat belt. That’s because at the center of the problem, the experts say, is an entirely new kind of object—the modern smartphone—that has become embedded in our consciousness in a way that’s changing our behavior on a massive scale."

Why you can’t stop checking your phone - Ideas - The Boston Globe