Evaluating the impact of penalising the use of mobile phones while driving on road traffic fatalities, serious injuries and mobile phone use: a systematic review.

BACKGROUND: A vast literature has demonstrated that using mobile phones while driving increases the risk of road traffic crashes. In response, policy-makers have introduced bans and harsher penalties on using mobile phones while driving. Even though emerging evidence suggests that such measures may reduce mobile phone use and crashes, the literature has not been systematically reviewed and synthesised. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the impact of penalising mobile phone use while driving on road traffic fatalities, serious injuries and the prevalence of mobile phone use while driving. METHODS: We employed a comprehensive search strategy using electronic databases, websites, handsearching and other sources to locate studies evaluating legislation on mobile phone use while driving. Randomised controlled trials, interrupted time series', controlled before-after studies with control(s) not exposed to harsher sanctions and panel data designs were included if they measured the outcomes of fatalities, serious injuries or the prevalence of mobile phone use while driving. Eligible studies were critically appraised. Due to substantial heterogeneity, the results were synthesised narratively. The synthesis structured studies according to the type of legislation and outcome measure. RESULTS: Of the 7420 studies retrieved, 32 were included. The evidence on the effects of penalising mobile phone use while driving was weak, and somewhat inconsistent, but pointed to a potential decrease in the prevalence of mobile phone use and fatalities for all-driver primary enforcement hand-held bans and texting bans. CONCLUSIONS: Preventing fatalities from risky driving practices may be helped by implementing harsher laws that penalise mobile phone use while driving.

The Effect of Moral Congruence of Calls to Action and Salient Social Norms on Online Charitable Donations: A Protocol Study.

Online advertising is an important tool that can be utilized by charities to elicit attention and funding. A critical examination of advertisement strategies is thus necessary to increase the efficacy of fundraising efforts. Previous studies have shown that individuals' moral views and perceptions of social norms can play important roles in charitable behavior. Thus, the current protocol describes a study to examine whether framing charitable advertisements in line with participants' morality and increasing the salience of descriptive social norms increases subsequent charitable behavior. We describe experimental, online methods, whereby participants are provided with a framed call-to-action and normative information within a custom-developed application or existing survey platform. Furthermore, in the exploratory fashion, we discuss the possibility of collecting participants' Facebook data and predicting moral profiles from this data. If there is an increased rate of donations as a result of moral compatibility and/or increased norm salience, charities can leverage this knowledge to increase the donations by tailoring their campaigns in a more appealing way for their prospective donors. Moreover, if it turns out to be possible to predict one's moral profile from Facebook footprints, charities can use this knowledge to find and target people that are more likely to support their cause. However, this introduces important ethical questions that are discussed within this protocol.