“Anxious” and “reckless” drivers

Abstract

This paper presents personality profiles of two types of recidivist traffic offenders. One is the “anxious” traffic offender who imputes legitimacy to traffic norms, yet due to innate structural personality defects, he tends to enter into a state of anxiety, when confronted with risky traffic situations or a traffic jam. The other type is the “reckless” driver, who does not impute legitimacy to traffic norms nor to other legal norms. From this personality theory a number of hypotheses were derived and tested by means of multiple regression. Our ability to predict the number of traffic offenses suggests that similar tools may be used by the traffic authorities and traffic courts.