9: Personality and Aggressive Driving

Aggressive driving is a worldwide problem (Jovanović et al., 2011). It captured the attention of the safety community and the general public at the end of the previous century, and has since remained a great public concern, so much so that in the U.S. over 50 percent of the motoring public considers it a very serious threat to their personal safety (AAAF, 2012). One official early estimate was that it is a factor in about two-thirds of all U.S. traffic fatalities (Martinez, 1997). However, its real extent is not known as different agencies have different definitions for aggressive driving. Most intriguing is the issue of whether it reflects a stable personality characteristic (or several characteristics) or whether it is a response to a particular driving situation, or both. Multi-national comparisons in driving behaviors including aggressive traffic violations indicate that some stable characteristics are involved in aggressive driving (Lajunen and Parker, 2001; Özkan et al., 2006). In this chapter, I try to address this intricate issue so that effective countermeasures can be developed to deal with it.