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Driver personalities and road safety

───   11:17 Tue, 28 Jun 2022

Sponsored11:17 Tue, 28 Jun 2022
Driver personalities and road safety | News Article

Have you ever sat in traffic and looked around at the other drivers around you and wondered what’s going through their minds? Why are they behaving the way they do?

In episode 2 of Road Safety with accidentAngels, Dr Lee Randall from the Road Ethics Project spoke to Shandor Potgieter about what your driving says about your personality. 

According to Dr Randall, the field of ethics looks at how people reason about what is right and wrong for them, and also how societies view right and wrong behaviour. There are several main kinds of ethical reasoning, all of which try to answer the question ‘how should we live?’ or ‘how should we live together?’

She explained the four most dominant types of ethical reasoning which can affect how someone behaves on the roads. 

Firstly, there are deontologists who see obeying the law as probably the most important thing to bear in mind. ‘Deon’ is a Greek word for ‘duty’, and people who have this ethical style tend to focus on whether a law has been broken, not so much on the consequences of a certain driving behaviour. They would feel OK to drive at 60km per hour past a school, because the law gives them that right. Or they would get upset by someone going through a red light or driving in the yellow lane, because those actions are against the law. They may even experience road rage or want to punish other road users who they see as law-breakers – including people crossing the road or recycling trolley-pushers using part of a vehicle lane.

The next group of ethical reasoners are utilitarians, who look for the greatest good – the greatest utility – in any situation; in other words, what will benefit the most people. So they may feel that it is right and proper to give right of way to a bus or minibus full of passengers, when they are a single vehicle occupant, or they may look at recycling trolley-pushers or cyclists and pedestrians and decide to prioritize their safety because they help the environment or because there are large numbers of them.

Then there are the egoists, people whose main ethical concerns are with ‘me and mine’ – getting themselves and their families safely to their destinations, preferably as quickly and comfortably as possible. They may favour fancy and fast cars which make them look good, even if they cause harm to the environment or threaten the safety of other road users. In rural areas, locals who are very focused on their own tasks and know the road well may drive in a way which disregards other drivers who they view as “just holidaymakers” or ‘city-slickers’.

Finally, and probably most relevant in a road safety sense, there are those who Dr Randall calls ‘ubuntu ethicists’, people whose ethical reasoning is communitarian – in other words, they tend to reason that they are part of a broader road-using community, in which your safety impacts on my safety and everyone has human worth and dignity.

Dr Randall is of the opinion that from a road safety point of view, it’s actually best not to try to figure out other road users’ personality types – something we call dispositional reasoning, where we make assumptions about why someone is driving or moving in a certain way – and instead focus on situational reasoning, where we respond to the reality of what we can see, keeping ourselves and others as safe as possible given that reality.

You can listen to the full conversation here:

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