Personality Traits and Attitudes Toward Traffic Safety Predict Risky Behavior Across Young, Adult, and Older Drivers

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Fabio Lucidi¹  Laura Girelli²  Andrea Chirico¹  Fabio Alivernini³  Mauro Cozzolino²  Cristiano Violani⁴  Luca Mallia⁵ 

[1] Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, La Sapienza University of Rome;Department of Human, and Educational Sciences, University of Salerno;National Institute for the Evaluation of the Education System;Department of Psychology, La Sapienza University of Rome;Department of Movement, Human and Health Sciences, Foro Italico University of Rome

关键词: attitudes;    personality;    age;    driving violations;    driving errors;    driving lapses;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00536

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

CC BY