Persuasion and attitude change in motorcycle safety training.

This paper presents research to promote enduring safe riding behaviours among motorcyclists, by influencing their expectancies, beliefs, and attitudes during training. It describes the results of the first two stages of this research. The first stage identifies which psychological factors should be addressed by training. The second stage selects the messages most effective at influencing these factors. The first stage used the results of a postal questionnaire survey of 4100 motorcyclists. The aim of this questionnaire was to investigate the social-psychological factors important in twelve safe and unsafe driving behaviours. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of persuasion provided a very useful framework for examining how to change attitudes. Riding behaviour was shown to be relatively stable over time, so that both safe and unsafe riding behaviour can be regarded as habitual. However, for riders under age 25, performance is still determined by a complex structure of psychological factors. The second stage applied the ELM to select the messages most effective at influencing the psychological determinants of young riders' behaviour. In this group, the rider's attitude to exceeding the speed limitis very important. An evaluation of an ELM-based training course showed that it produced limited attitude changes among trainees, but that these changes were not supported by changes in their thinking. Therefore, they had no long-term effects on behaviour.