Social Science Studies the Most Hazardous Thing on the Road: You

An ordinary car has about 30,000 separate parts, but only one component is persistently prone to catastrophic failure: the driver. Whereas 2 percent of accidents are caused by equipment malfunction, 94 percent are the driver’s fault.

That is why much of the progress in highway safety during the past century has resulted from behavioral science that reveals how drivers interact with their vehicles. The value of this work will only increase as the nation finds itself on the verge of a revolution in personal transportation—the self-driving automobile.

Many safety systems and procedures we take for granted today arose from applied behavioral research—where cognitive science meets engineering, and both advance in tandem. For example, the fact that cars are now equipped with a center-mounted supplementary brake light more easily seen by drivers following behind is thanks to a groundbreaking study of rear-end crashes conducted by California psychologist John Voevodsky in the early 1970s.

Voevodsky was a pioneer in what is now known as the science of human factors and ergonomics. The field had been growing rapidly since World War II, when there was a sudden pressing need to reduce errors and accidents caused by personnel using complicated military systems. Understanding how operators act and designing methods to optimize safety and system performance became increasingly urgent priorities. After the war, as the number of vehicles and drivers rose rapidly, automobile operation became a natural focus for the field.

Human factors, indeed any science, works like a jigsaw puzzle: Each piece of new knowledge helps reveal the shape of the overall pattern and then shows where the next piece needs to go. When Voevodsky began his investigations, many pieces were already in place. In 1955, the Society of Automotive Engineers had collected and published anthropometric data for people ranging in size from the 5th to 95th percentile. Standardized measurement procedures arose and by the early 1960s behavioral science had produced a new tool called the “eyellipse.” It was a set of specifications, based on the location of a driver’s eyes within a car, exactly quantifying the ellipse-shaped field of view available to people of different shapes and heights—including the neck pivot points at which vision is cut off. Those advances provided a basis for evaluating what drivers could and could not see.

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