The effect of the commitment to comply with speed limits during rehabilitation training courses for traffic regulation offenders in France. European Review of Applied Psychology] who found, from phone interviews, a positive effect of the commitment to comply with speed limits. Our second aim was to extend the previous study. In the present study, we used the same mixed Foot-in-the-door procedure and introduced one more experimental condition in which committed participants were additionally asked to specify the actions they would adopt in the next 6 months to keep their commitment. Six hundred and seventy-eight participants were assigned to one of the two experimental conditions, a comparison condition or a control condition. Only 38% of participants committed but we regained the positive effect of commitment on self-reported speed in the short term and for more than 5 months after the courses. In the committed group which specified actions, the effect appeared on more specific roads than in the committed group which did not specify actions. The actions were categorised according to whether they were exclusively cognitive or behavioural, or both. The committed participants who declared having complied with speed limits, compared to those who declared having broken them, before the first interview, reported during the course more of both (cognitive and behavioural actions). The interest of integrating commitment procedure in rehabilitation training courses together with the actions specified to keep one's commitment is discussed. (A) Reprinted with permission from Elsevier.
Abstract