This lecture summarises ten years of work at the Driver Behaviour Research Group in the Department of Psychology at Manchester University, England. Issues addressed include which types of bad driving are most strongly associated with accidents, how to predict which drivers will have those accidents, and the best ways of preventing these accidents. The human factor plays a crucial factor in accident causation, and a conceptual distinction is made between errors, lapses, and violations on the road. `Errors' comprise the categories of potentially dangerous mistakes, 'lapses' are usually harmless but irritating and `violations' are committed intentionally in the knowledge that behaviour is potentially dangerous and often illegal. To assess the validity of these distinctions, the Group developed its Driver Behaviour Questionnaire (DBQ), a 24-item questionnaire measure which includes eight items of each type. The DBQ was administered to two large national samples of drivers; principal components analyses of their responses showed that the three types of error could indeed be distinguished. Regression analysis showed that older and female drivers had fewer accidents; it disclosed a correlation between DBQ sores and accident rates, where violation + error = catastrophe. The Group focuses on changing drivers' behaviour by changing their attitudes.
Abstract