Here. Quick! Let’s pass a law banning headphones on public walkways and save lives! Another headline, “Headphones Linked to Pedestrian Deaths, Injuries”.
The study is pretty much meaningless. It does not discuss how many fewer non-headphone wearing pedestrians were killed, an obviously important number particularly since the time period of the study has seen a dramatic rise in the number of people carrying mobile devices that have headsets for music and phone.
Why is this bad science? Let’s say we woke up tomorrow morning and absolutely everyone walking down the street had headphones on. 100% of all pedestrian fatalities would involve people wearing headphones! Clearly, the headphones are to blame! Or are they? We could do the same thought experiment with red-sweaters; would red-sweaters then be to blame? This is simply shoddy reasoning.
What reason do we have to believe there hasn’t been a concomitant decrease in the number of non-headhpone wearing pedestrians killed in accidents? That is, perhaps roughly the same number of people are dying, just more of them happen to have headphones on when they are killed because more people are wearing headphones. It is possible that there is a dual effect here… perhaps pedestrians are a little more likely to be involved in a fatal accident and there are just more people wearing headphones and being involved in fatal accidents (that they would have been involved in anyway, regardless of the headphones). This study doesn’t look at any of that.
Now, let’s pile on top of the bad science, bad journalism:
“Sensory deprivation that results from using headphones with electronic devices may be a unique problem in pedestrian incidents, where auditory cues can be more important than visual ones,” they wrote.
OK? So? What does this have to do with the man on the moon? Lunar tidal forces may also be a unique, unstudied problem in pedestrian accidents… let’s go study that. The journalists eagerly pass on the study authors’ insinuations of causality on the basis of not even correlation, just some random numbers mined out of public sources.
What to do about it? Well, if you are a concerned citizen and you value human life, the solution is obvious even if a little uncomfortable at first. We need municipal ordinances banning pedestrian headhpones in major cities. Then a few enlightened states will pick up the cause. Finally, we can ban pedestrian headphones at the Federal level. One day, we can even get the UN to ban them globally. This is the puerile level of reasoning on which most public policy is conducted.
The paper. It includes helpfully leading language suggesting that perhaps teens are the most “at risk” group. Wink, wink. (Let’s ban teen pedestrian headphone use).
Clayton -