Persuasion, Indoctrination, and Inoculation
Erin Bagwell
PSY/285
August 17, 2014
Linda Long

Persuasion, Indoctrination, and Inoculation
Texting has become such a central point and form of communication in our lives today that we as a society apparently would not know how to communicate without it. While this form of communication can be great in its ability to communicate without speaking, it also has a potentially fatal downside for those who text while driving. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, over 3000 people were killed in 2011 because they were distracted while driving (NTSHA, n.d.). A major source of this distraction while driving comes from the usage of cell phones and texting. While there are many skeptics out there that would argue that there are ways to multitask while driving, there is an overwhelming amount of data that supports the idea that it is not only dangerous, but potentially fatal, making it something very hard to create a good argument against.
Most individuals are aware of the dangers of driving while being intoxicated, but what about driving while intexticated? Intextication, according to California Highway Patrol, “an individual becomes disconnected with their surroundings because they are mentally occupied with their cell phone” ("New approaches to end texting while driving," 2013). By looking at the overwhelming number of distraction-related accidents, it would seem as though people would be capable of realizing that it is not worth the risk to text while they are driving. Most people would feel that it is safe to assume that texting while driving is not a good thing to do, but the interesting thing is that over 40% of Americans have admitted to doing exactly that ("Stop the Texts, Stop the Wrecks," n.d.). One great way to view this would be to place yourself in the shoes of a person who just found