The purpose of continuing a project that the Swiss Council for Accident Prevention carried out in 1990/91 jointly with the Applied Psychology Faculty of the University of Fribourg was to investigate experimentally the influence of personality characteristics on driving behaviour and, in particular, on the observance of road traffic regulations. The selected personality traits were aggressiveness and reactance, which had been shown to be significant in a representative survey by Aebischer & Schneider (1991). The design chosen for the experiment was a comparison of extreme groups which involved maintaining the confounding variables constant or partialling them out. Only males between 30 and 45 years of age took part in the test. In the first part of the two-phase test procedure a questionnaire was used to identift persons displaying extremes of aggressiveness or reactance. Of the 871 test persons who filed in the questionnaire, 210 who had the most extreme values in respect of aggressiveness or reactance were invited to take part in the experimental stage of the study. Of these, 176 persons actually took part and were evaluated.
Samenvatting