KU News Release

Graduation stories: Budding researcher boosts knowledge of cell phone behavior

Erik Nelson

LAWRENCE — During his time at the University of Kansas, Erik Nelson researched why — despite the risks — people talk and text on cell phones while driving cars. His well-publicized study has shed an important light on drivers’ hazardous cell phone habits.

Growing up in a close-knit family from Olathe, Nelson was interested in cell phones and human behavior from an early age. “My dad works for Sprint, in customer experience marketing,” Nelson says. “So I’ve always had an interest in what makes a good or bad customer experience with a product. My mom’s a registered nurse, so that’s probably had something to do with my interest in science as well.”

Nelson says he decided on KU because of his desire to perform original research. Although he arrived in Lawrence with the intention of pursuing a degree in engineering, that plan changed after exposure to other fields of study.

“I looked around a little bit more and become interested in human factors psychology,” says Nelson. “That’s the melding of engineering and psychology, where you’re taking a look at physical limitations from the engineering side and from the psychology side looking at cognitive limitations — then being able to work around those when designing a system.”

Nelson will graduate May 18 with a major in cognitive psychology and a minor in quantitative psychology. He then heads to graduate school in the fall. “My KU experience has allowed me to go into a very good human factors program at George Mason University,” he says.

While oftentimes the kind of research Nelson carried out is associated with faculty or graduate students, he says that his experience at KU allowed him ample opportunity to conduct original academic inquiry as an undergraduate.

During his sophomore year working in the laboratory of Paul Atchley, associate professor of cognitive psychology at KU, Nelson’s career as a researcher began to blossom.

“I kind of began in his lab as a tech, just collecting and analyzing data,” says Nelson. “After about a year of that, he approached me and asked if I’d like to do my own research project. I quickly accepted. It was something that I always wanted to do.”

Nelson also has received two grants from the University Honors Program to support his cell phone research. “For undergraduates, they have grants that allow you to fund independent research,” explains Nelson. “And I actually presented at two conferences last year — the grants allowed me to fly out there, which I ordinarily wouldn’t have been able to do. That was a very good thing for me and was one of the things that helped me to get into a pretty good school for graduate work as well.”

The results of Nelson’s research are indeed startling: All 276 participants in Nelson’s study who owned both a mobile telephone and a motor vehicle admitted to talking on their phones while behind the wheel.

“These were pretty alarming numbers to us,” says Nelson. “You have people who know that driving while talking on a cellular phone is dangerous, however, they do it anyway. And we just wanted to figure out why is this is happening.”

Nelson says he hopes that people take a valuable lesson away from his research — that usually the risks of talking while driving far outweigh the rewards.

“Many people understand that talking while driving is a risky behavior,” Nelson says. “However they still do it. People tend to believe that their conversations are a little more important than they are. Some of the conversation types that we looked at — like talking to fend off boredom while driving — people surprisingly thought that that was pretty important to them. So, obviously, importance to people is highly skewed sometimes.”

Interviewing participants aged 18 to 29, Nelson discovered that if people believe that a call is important to make, they would initiate the call with almost no regard for the risk involved. What’s worse, Nelson found 72 percent of those owning a car and a cell phone admitted to text messaging while driving, an activity the participants themselves perceived as even more dangerous than chatting.

“You’re trying to do two visual tasks at the same time — and that doesn’t work out for most people,” Nelson asserts. “You see them swerving to the left, swerving to the right. You drive by them kind of fast, to get by quick, and you realize this person has been texting the whole time. So it’s kind of a national epidemic.”

Nelson received attention in the national media for his research, appearing in an article in the Sacramento Bee that was syndicated nationwide via the Associated Press. Local news outlets, such as the Lawrence Journal-World, also covered Nelson’s research.

“It was obviously very flattering,” Nelson says of the attention to his work. “I never expected that to happen. Obviously text messaging while driving is kind of a hot topic right now. I kind of lucked into that a little bit since my research had something to do with it. And really, it’s kind of startling that that many people text while driving.”

Someday, Nelson hopes to apply his research to a career that will involve many of the same issues that he is investigating already.

“I envision myself working for a consulting company or a corporation applying human factors principles to new products and systems,” he says. “I’ve always been intrigued by automobiles — and there are a lot of human factors issues that go into automobile design. So, I think a career in the automotive industry would also be a place where I would enjoy myself.”

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