The young and the reckless: Social and physical warning messages reduce dangerous driving behavior in a simulator

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Abstract

Road accidents are mostly avoidable and young males seem to be the group most prone to adopt dangerous driving behavior. Many efforts have been made to specifically target this group using two different kinds of warning messages: social and physical warnings. The relative effectiveness of these warning messages has never been compared directly, and their direct effectiveness has never been assessed in a realistic driving simulator to observe possible immediate changes in behavior while driving. Fifty young Israeli drivers (27 women) performed a driving task in a life-size driving simulator before and after watching either a physical or a social warning message. We compared the subject's driving behavior in terms of collisions, speed excesses, and non-compliance with traffic lights before and after watching the warning videos. We show that physical and social warning messages both had an immediate positive influence on reckless driving behavior in a realistic driving scenario, and that viewing the social video had a greater impact on men than on women. Our results indicate that both kinds of warning messages are effective in immediately reducing reckless driving behavior, but that publicity campaigns targeting specifically young males would benefit from developing social warning messages.

Introduction

Road accidents entail a huge economic cost (Elvik, 2000) and cause a total of approximately 1.35 million deaths worldwide every year (World Health Organization). In Israel, where this study was conducted, 175 people were killed in 2016 in road accidents, an increase of 5 % compared to 2015 (National Road Safety Authority, Or Yarok, 2018a), and 355 people were killed in 2019, an increase of 12.3 % from 2018 (National Road Safety Authority, Or Yarok, 2020). Moreover, using questionnaires it was found that Israeli drivers report more speed excesses, lack of respect for the rights of pedestrians, failure to fasten their seatbelt, and phone use while driving than European drivers (National Road Safety Authority, Or Yarok, 2018b). Mass advertising campaigns explaining the threats associated with dangerous or reckless driving behaviors can influence risk taking and are efficient in reducing the number of accidents in large populations (Tay, 2003; Wakefield et al., 2010). In order to prevent traffic accidents, governments worldwide have embarked on very aggressive campaigns with threatening messages about the consequences of road accidents (Tay, 2003; Lewis et al., 2007a, 2007b; Wakefield et al., 2010; Lemarié et al., 2018; Lemarié et al., 2019).

The National Road Safety Authority in Israel identified young male and new drivers (ages 17–24) as high risk groups that could benefit from targeted advertising campaigns due to their higher involvement in road accidents. The prevalence of reckless driving and risk taking observed in young male drivers is characterized by an increase in speed above the legal limit, non-compliance with traffic signs and traffic lights, and crashes (Deffenbacher et al., 2003). Regardless of driving experience, young male drivers treat road hazards more facetiously than older drivers and tend to show a lower level of motivation to obey traffic laws (Groeger, 1992; Awialie Akaateba, 2013). This group's tendency to undermine the relevance of physical threats can be attributed to the immaturity of the functional development of the prefrontal cortex (Chini & Hanganu-Opatz, 2020), which is also very sensitive to societal feedback (Qu et al., 2018). This sensitivity to societal feedback also partly explains the deleterious effect that the media's promotion of dangerous behavior can have on young people (Javadi et al., 2012). By promoting a positive image of these dangerous behaviours and, in particular, the idea that they are favoured by society, the media encourages young people to adopt them for the sake of positive social feedback (Silverblatt, 2004). Indeed, Golmier et al. (2007), have demonstrated in an experimental study that film scenes in which smokers are positively featured can encourage adolescents to smoke. This result has been reproduced in the case of film scenes that emphasized reckless driving. Lemarié, Chebat and Bellavance (2018), showed that speed scenes in movies can have comparable effects to smoking scenes in movies and encourage young people to engage in dangerous behaviors on the road.

Prevention messages have been developed in order to counteract these potentially disastrous effects and to encourage young people to adopt more cautious behaviors on the road. These prevention messages can be distinguished according to the type of threat they use to limit dangerous behavior (Lemarié et al., 2018): messages that emphasize a physical threat versus those that emphasize a social threat, i.e. physical and social warnings. Physical warnings, that usually target young men, have traditionally relied on the description of physical injury to reduce risky driving (Qu et al., 2018, National Road Safety Authority), and have been shown to be effective (Hastings et al., 2004). Social warnings, on the other hand, focus on the social perception of risk and have also been shown to reduce the chances of adopting dangerous behaviors (Beaulieu, 2011; Borges et al., 2015; Hansen, 1991; Taubman, 2008). Social threats represent the idea of being ignored or rejected by others, or being in a situation which could elicit negative evaluation from others (Huang et al., 2011; Schröder, 2007; Hartgerink et al., 2015; Malevich, 2018). Both of these types of prevention messages employ fear, or threatening warnings, as an appeal to change behavior, which has been shown to be effective to fight against compulsive behavior, as long as the information in the warning is processed in depth (Munoz et al., 2010).

Indeed, graphic warning messages have been used to test immediate changes in emotions, cognitive responses and attitude changes regarding compulsive behaviors (Munoz, Chebat, & Borges, 2013). Munoz, Chebat and Borges (2013) studied the effect of warning messages on gambling behavior. Participants had first to fill out a questionnaire about their gambling behavior and were then exposed to a warning message. They then filled out another questionnaire capturing the emotions triggered by the warning message, involvement and attitude change. This procedure enabled them to measure immediate behavior changes after being exposed to the warning message. In the present study, we are also interested in observing immediate changes in risky or reckless driving behavior following exposure to the warning messages. We ask the following questions: can viewing a warning message while at a stop light change the way you continue to drive after having viewed this message? If so, what type of message will be more effective, Social or physical warnings? In order to answer these questions we will use a dynamic display of warning messages and a driving simulator to measure immediate changes in reckless driving behavior while driving. Dynamic displays of warning messages along the highway have been shown to immediately reduce reckless driving in a simulated driving course (Lee and Abdel Ay, 2008), and can also counteract the direct negative effects of exposure to reckless driving behaviours (Lemarié et al., 2018). The use of a life-like driving simulator provides a wider range of driving situations than in real life, so drivers must be reactive to their environment (inside and outside the car). This makes it possible to test immediate changes in their driving ability, capacity to pay attention, and to drive safely in a controlled virtual environment (Lew et al., 2005), or respect pedestrian crossing signs with various auditory or visual warnings (Calvi et al., 2020). Driving simulators have proven to be a good way to test driving intentions and capabilities (Doroudgar et al., 2017), for all kinds of population groups, and even populations who are more prone to accidents such as people who are clinically at risk (Freund et al., 2005a) or ageing populations (Freund et al., 2005b).

It is already well known that warning messages can have an impact on behavior (Munoz et al.,. 2010, 2013; Lemarié et al., 2018; Hastings et al., 2004; Beaulieu, 2011; Borges et al., 2015; Hansen, 1991; Taubman, 2008), and that young men are the group that is primarily at risk for dangerous driving behavior (Deffenbacher et al., 2003; Groeger, 1992; Awialie Akaateba, 2013). Our aim in this research is to use the driving simulator to test on this high risk population the effects of warning messages to change driving behavior. Additionally, given this group's tendency to minimize physical threats (Chini & Hanganu-Opatz, 2020), and their sensitivity to societal rewards (Qu et al., 2018), we will ask whether a social threat type message might be more effective than a physical threat type message. In sum in this research we ask the following questions:

  • -

    Which type of warning message, social threat versus physical threat, is more effective in reducing unsafe driving behavior?

  • -

    Is there a difference in the effectiveness of each threat based on the target population, particularly between men (most at risk) and women?

Based on previous research that have highlighted the beneficial effect of warning messages on young people and those that have highlighted the role of social influence in the adoption of risky behaviors by young men, we formulate the following two hypotheses:

H1

Exposure to warning messages reduces dangerous driving behavior.

H2

Warning messages involving a social threat are more effective in reducing risky driving among young men than warning messages involving a physical threat.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were 50 young drivers from diverse geographical and socio-economic backgrounds in Israel, registered as students at Ariel University, Israël. 27 women and 23 men, aged from 20 to 38 years old participated in the study. The mean age of subjects was 24 years (SD = 3.0). The procedures were approved by Ariel University Ethics Committee in accordance with the 1964 Helsinki declaration. All participants were in possession of a driving license.

Warning videos

Participants were randomly assigned into one

Results

In terms of difference between the pre and post warning videos, we found that the exposure to both of the warning videos reduced significantly reckless driving behavior measures, both collisions and lack of respect of traffic lights were reduced in the post condition for both social and physical threat groups. In addition, the number of collisions were significantly reduced after watching the social video and not after watching the physical warning video (section 3.1). We also note that social

Discussion

Both physical and social warning messages had a positive influence on driving behavior in the simulator. There was a significant difference in the general hazardous error gap before and after the exposure to both types of warning videos. We also found that viewing the social message appeared to have a greater impact on men than on women and that the physical threat message is more effective for women than men.

Our results are in line with previous studies finding that social preventive messages

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Professor Bellavance for help with statistical analysis discussions and advice on statistical testing. This article is part of the special collection in memory of Professor Jean-Charles Chebat. When he arrived in Israel in 2013, he observed that there were many cases of reckless driving in Israel. We had started discussing possible ways of testing the effects of publicity campaigns aiming at reducing risky behavior on the road using physiological and

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