Abstract
In the last few decades, several studies have investigated the role of personality traits and attitudes toward traffic safety in predicting driving behaviors in diverse types of drivers across several countries. However, to the best of our knowledge, no studies so far have investigated the possible moderating role played by age in relation to predictors of accident risk. Answering this open question would provide information about the generalizability of the model across different subpopulations and would make possible the tailoring of the interventions to specific target groups. The study involved 1,286 drivers from three different age groups (young: n = 435; adult: n = 412; old: n = 439) which completed a questionnaire measuring drivers’ personality traits (i.e., anxiety, hostility, excitement seeking, altruism, normlessness), positive attitudes toward traffic safety, risky driving behaviors (i.e., errors, lapses, and traffic violations), accident involvement and number of traffic fines issued in the last 12 months. Multi-group Variance Based Structural Equation Modeling (VB-SEM) across the three age groups showed that the hypothesized model had a good fit with the data in all the three age groups. However, some pattern of relationships between the variables varied across the three groups, for example, if considering the direct effects of personality traits on risky driving behaviors, anxiety, altruism, and normlessness predicted violations only in young and adult drivers, whereas excitement seeking was associated with lapses only in young drivers; anxiety was a positive predictor of drivers’ errors, both in adult and older drivers, whereas excitement seeking predicted errors in adult and young drivers. On the other hand, attitudes significantly and negatively predicted violations and errors in all the three age groups, whereas they significantly and negatively predicted lapses only in young and older drivers. The results of the present study provided empirical basis to develop evidence-based road safety interventions differently tailored to the specific life’s stage of the drivers.
Highlights
According to the World Health Organization [WHO] (2018), every year around the world 1.25 million people die because of a road traffic accident and, between 20 and 50 million more people are injured with many of them incurring a disability (World Health Organization [WHO], 2018)
The results showed that altruism, excitement seeking, and normlessness were significantly associated with bus drivers’ attitudes toward traffic safety
Considering the effects of personality characteristics on risky driving behaviors at the wheel, the results showed that excitement seeking affected violations in all the tree age groups of drivers to the same extent
Summary
According to the World Health Organization [WHO] (2018), every year around the world 1.25 million people die because of a road traffic accident and, between 20 and 50 million more people are injured with many of them incurring a disability (World Health Organization [WHO], 2018). To this end, Reason et al (1990) taxonomy of driving behaviors represents the widest theoretical model in order to understand the behaviors at the wheel that may be at risk In their model they categorize three different risky driving behaviors, with each of them related to a distinct cognitive and decisional process: (1) errors, which consists in a failure of planned actions to achieve their intended consequences and largely representing information-processing deficits (e.g., braking too quickly on a slippery road); (2) lapses, which consists in failures of attention and memory (e.g., trying to drive away from traffic lights in third gear); (3) violations, which consists in conscious and deliberate decisions to deviate from rules or safe driving practices (e.g., deciding to do not stop at the red light). Errors or lapses did not predict accident involvement for young and adult drivers (Parker et al, 1995a,b), whereas they did in older drivers (e.g., Parker et al, 2000)
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