Vlogging while driving not safe, even hands-free, says Florida professor

FLORIDA – A University of South Florida professor of psychology and Erie Insurance are raising awareness of the dangers of vlogging while driving.

The trend involves popular social media influencers talking to a camera mounted on their dashboard to create videos for their followers.  While the behavior may seem safe because it’s hands-free, an internationally recognized expert on distracted driving says it’s anything but.

“The research is absolutely clear. Hands-free is not safe,” said Paul Atchley, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida, who has been studying distracted driving for more than 20 years.

“It’s your brain that’s the problem, not touching a phone. And we know when your brain is engaged by a phone call – even a hands-free one – the risk for a car crash increases.”

Erie Insurance said it showed Atchley several videos gaining buzz online showing influencers looking back and forth between their camera and the road, fiddling with the camera on their dashboard, and in one case, almost swerving off the road.

“We reached out to Dr. Atchley to shed light on what’s going on in the brain that makes this behavior actually much more dangerous than people realize,” said Jon Bloom, vice president of personal auto, Erie Insurance.

The answer, says Atchley, is that multi-tasking is a myth. People can switch back and forth between tasks but can truly only do one thing at a time.

Different Types of Distractions

To see how vlogging while driving, even with a mounted camera, is distracting, it’s important to understand the term’s meaning.

A distraction is something that’s not related to the primary task. Creating a social media video is a distraction if the primary task is driving.

There are three categories of distractions: manual, visual and cognitive.

In the case of videotaping oneself while driving, the manual distraction is taking hands off the wheel, the visual is looking at the camera instead of the road, and the cognitive distraction is “performing” for the camera instead of focusing on driving.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, nine people in the U.S. are killed every day in crashes involving a distracted driver. The risk is the greatest for young adults under 25 who are more likely to die in a car crash than the next three causes of death combined.

“I hope that social media influencers who vlog while driving realize that they are influencing a portion of the population that is more likely to die in a car crash than the next three causes of death combined,” said Atchley.

“So not only are they demonstrating bad behavior, they’re demonstrating it to a group of individuals who already are at high risk.”

Atchley encourages influencers to set a good example. “I would ask them to do the right thing. Don’t be part of the problem, be the solution.”