Why Do Smart People Keep Making a Deadly Choice? by Garrett

Why Do Smart People Keep Making a Deadly Choice? by Garrett - October 2026 Scholarship Essay

The question that pulled me in was simple: why do smart people keep making a deadly choice? I drive for Uber, over three thousand trips, and I have watched more drivers run red lights and glance at their phones than I can count. When I started researching a paper on unsafe driving, I expected the answer to be carelessness. What I found was a system.

I read twelve sources: federal crash data, insurance industry studies, state highway safety reports, and peer-reviewed research on driver psychology. The numbers stopped me cold. Then the psychology explained the numbers. Drivers do not text because they do not know it is dangerous. They text because of something researchers call optimistic bias: every driver believes they are the exception, more skilled and more alert than the average. Add intermittent rewards, the ping of a message, the small dopamine hit of checking, and you get behavior that looks irrational from the outside and feels completely reasonable from behind the wheel.

That changed how I understood my own field. I am a nursing student working toward becoming a nurse anesthetist, and the same pattern shows up in healthcare. Patients skip medications they know they need. People in pain avoid the clinic until the problem is an emergency. It is not ignorance. It is the same optimistic bias, the same discounting of future consequences, the same human wiring. Public health is not just biology. It is psychology applied at scale.

The project deepened my understanding in a second way. I went in thinking of research as collecting facts to support a point I had already decided. I came out understanding that real research changes the question. I started asking why drivers make bad choices and ended up asking how environments are designed, by all of us, to make good choices harder than they should be. That is a nursing question too. The best patient education in the world fails if the patient's life makes the healthy choice the hard choice.

Three thousand trips taught me to watch the road. Twelve sources taught me to watch the driver. I am still curious about what else I am seeing but not yet understanding.