I’ve been doing a lot of driving recently, and since it is the summer (aka orange barrel season), I’ve driven through a lot of work zones. All highway work zones have one thing in common: they have a set of signs that (it seems to me) are designed to induce drivers to slow down. Slowing down makes a lot of sense; slower drivers are less likely to get in an accident, and less likely to injure one of the workers in the work zone (or damage the in-progress work).
However, being the researcher I am, I couldn’t help but think about the incentive design aspects of these work zones. Given that you have a design goal of inducing drivers to slow down, what is the best way to do that? The only design lever you have: signs on the highway. So far, I’ve seen three strategies in use:
- “45 where workers present.” Allow people to drive fairly fast (usually 60 mph), but require cars to drive slower in areas where workers are present. This allows people to still get where they are going relatively quickly without endangering highway workers. Seems like it should work well, but only if people actually slow down. In my experience, most people don’t notice the workers until its too late (generous interpretation) or just don’t slow down (cynical interpretation).
- “Minimum fine: $600.” Threaten people with extremely high fines for violations in work areas. Given that work zones are more difficult to police than regular traffic, and regular traffic has a low probability of being caught, these don’t seem to work that well either.
- “Give em a break.” Appeal to people’s altruistic side. Ask people to slow down for the sake of the workers. If asked, I bet most people would agree to slow down. But when faced with the possibility of being late, or having to spend even longer in the car with screaming kids, altruism turns out to be very low on the list of priorities.
So, what kind of alternative signs might better influence drivers to slow down?
People have a strong tendency to conform and emulate behaviors they see in other people like them. This is called following a social norm. Often, just informing people of how others are behaving can have a strong influence on behavior. Robert Cialdini, the social psychologist, calls this form influence “invisible” because people rarely believe that social norms are the reason for their behavior. But his experiments have shown that social norms have a very strong influence. So one possible sign would be “The average speed of cars through work zones is 48 mph.” However, Cialdini’s work has shown that information about other people like you has the strongest effect. We don’t have much information about drivers to use to customize this message, but we do know one thing: which work zone they are in. So an even better sign might be “The average speed of cars through this work zone is 48 mpg.”
One thing that seems to work well for police is those machines that display your current speed. It makes people feel like they are being watched, and people who feel that way work harder to conform to expectations and rules. On the highway, those machines don’t work as well because there are multiple lanes. However, along the same lines, it might be valuable to put a sign up with “watching eyes.” Often signs with eyes on them can induce that same feeling of being watched in people, which will cause them to slow down. Again, this feeling and the associated behavioral changes might be somewhat invisible; even if people know what is going on and don’t think it will effect them, it does.
What are some other possibilities for signs to get people to slow down? Leave thoughts in the comments.
Image credit: Nevada DOT
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