ABSTRACT
Introduction
It has been well documented by researchers in traffic psychology that age and gender can help in the prediction of accident rates – males and younger drivers tend to be involved in more accidents (for example, Krahe, 2005; Krahé and Fenske, 2002; stradling and Parker, 1997). There are a number of studies showing that driving style and a tendency towards specific deviations from safe driving patterns is inherited from parents – children display the same driving style as their parents (Bianchi and Summala, 2004; Taubman-Ben-Ari et al., 2005). This may provide support for arguments that there are other culturally shared motivational forces in addition to the family that shape driving behaviour. Our proposal in the present paper is that human values carry significant power in explanations of deviations from safe driving patterns. The role of values in this context has been studied on a cultural (in other words country) level (Özkan and Lajunen, 2007). There have also been studies which relate values to driving behaviour in general, for example values have been used in explaining socially responsible car usage. It has been shown that egocentric values are positively related to socially problematic usage of transport, while altruistic and biospheric values related negatively (de Groot and steg, 2007). To our knowledge, there have been two studies of a smaller scale thus far, where individual values were treated as predictor variables in explaining traffic accidents (Muzikante and Renge, 2008; Renge et al., 2008). However, these two studies were primarily focused on other research issues besides values and involved relatively small samples of drivers. in the present study our aim was to test whether human values, in addition to age and gender, carry incremental validity in explaining traffic accidents.
