A study carried out in Texas shows that the proliferation of signs on the highways with shocking messages, for example, would rather tend to increase accidents.
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What if road safety signs were counterproductive? An American study has worked on certain road signs, such as illuminated signs installed on highways, and concludes that some could be counterproductive.
Conducted in Texas, the American state with the most road deaths each year, the study establishes that certain messages can increase the number of accidents instead of limiting them. The researchers thus noted a 4.3% increase in accidents in the ten kilometers following the display of these luminous messages on the motorway. In this case, it was road safety messages that display the number of road deaths during the year. Displaying this somewhat shocking value on highway signs is a device that has developed a lot in the United States: they are distributed in 28 states. However, the researchers generalize their findings and suspect that this observation could be valid for other types of messages, even less aggressive than the death count.
The hypothesis is that these messages are made to attract our attention, but they overload our brains: this additional cognitive load may be enough to push some drivers beyond their attention span and cause them to make driving errors. The researchers point in particular to the messages that lack clarity, which are difficult to transform into action, such as the number of deaths. The brain doesn’t really know how to process this information and we get distracted from driving. The researchers note the lack of accurate evaluations of the effectiveness of these devices and call for further studies.