"I'm Too Good to Be Cautious"

Over the last two decades, mobile phone use has heavily increased in our society. According to the Statista database, there are 2.7 billion smartphone users in the world today. This means that almost every third person worldwide owns a smartphone.

A growing number of studies have investigated the effects of mobile phone use on human behavior and have shown that it can have both positive and negative consequences. Mobile phone use can offer social opportunities, such as increasing the number of potential communication partners available at any specific place and time, and can optimize communication in important settings. For example, it has been shown that mobile-based applications can improve nurse-patient communication in the medical setting and be used as tools to monitor health outcomes in chronic diseases (e.g., heart disease, asthma, and diabetes).

On the other hand, research demonstrated that mobile phone use can also yield negative effects on behavior, which include addiction-like symptoms (e.g., fear of being without cell phone), antisocial behaviors (e.g., phubbing, which is the habit of snubbing someone in favor of a mobile phone), cyberbullying (i.e., using mobile phones for bullying someone), and adolescent sexting (i.e., sharing sexually explicit messages, photographs, or images of oneself to others).

In particular, studies showed that mobile phone use while driving can lead to dangerous consequences. Mobile phone use, indeed, can affect numerous abilities that are crucial while operating a motor vehicle, such as attention and monitoring abilities, and thus increase the risk of potential driver distractions, which are responsible for about 25% of car crashes.

Interestingly, research demonstrated that this dangerous and common habit, which concerns between 60% and 80% of mobile phone users, seems to be associated with specific sociodemographic characteristics and personality traits. For example, it has been shown that male, young, and highly educated individuals are more likely to show dangerous mobile phone use. Similarly, personality predispositions, such as heightened sensation-seeking traits (i.e., personality traits characterized by the search for intense experiences and feelings and by the readiness to take risks for the sake of such experiences), a tendency to have low self-control, high impulsivity, and compromised delay discounting (i.e., tendency to prefer a lower reward in the present than a greater reward in the future) have been reported to be related to dangerous phone use while driving.

Now, new research conducted in Switzerland and published in the journal Computers in Human Behaviour suggests that self-esteem may play a critical role in such behavior. In particular, Lannoy and colleagues found evidence that the implicit (but not explicit) self-esteem can predict dangerous mobile phone use while driving. Explicit self-esteem reflects conscious evaluations that are potentially subject to social desirability, while implicit self-esteem is thought to infer automatic evaluations that exist in memory and may thus be less influenced by conscious intentions.

In Lannoy and colleagues’ study, implicit self-esteem was measured by means of an Implicit Association Test (IAT), a measure aimed at assessing automatic evaluations that are stored in memory. In particular, participants were asked to complete an IAT measuring the association strength between the concepts “me/other” and the attributes “positive/negative.” Explicit self-esteem was instead measured by means of a questionnaire evaluating how satisfied participants were with themselves. In addition, participants were asked to complete items about their demographics (e.g., sex and age) and mobile phone use. Mobile phone items measured both the dangerous (e.g., “while driving, I find myself in dangerous situations because of my mobile phone use”) and general phone use (e.g., “how many phone calls did you make per day?”).

Results showed that high implicit self-esteem emerged as a significant predictor of dangerous mobile phone use. That is, people who evaluated themselves more positively at the implicit level, also show a higher number of dangerous mobile phone behaviors while driving. Notably, this relation remained after authors controlled for demographic data and general mobile phone use.

Authors say that these results suggest that “individuals with high self-esteem are more prone to engaging in dangerous behaviors (e.g., they may tend to think that they can manage the double task of phoning and driving)” and are in line with previous research: “Our findings dovetail previous studies pointing out the role of high self-esteem in risky behaviors. For instance, high self-esteem has been associated with extreme physical activity, alcohol use among college students, stronger commitment in Facebook groups, and specific patterns of video game involvement. Likewise, individuals with high self-esteem make more risky choices during decision-making tasks, especially in loss situations.”

Confident people tend to be more successful in a wide variety of domains and go out in the world and reach for their goals, yet sometimes a high level of self-esteem might be a problem. When confidence becomes a lack of caution, it can put you and others in danger.