Risk mentality: why drivers
take the risk they do
We
have been told forever that drivers' risky actions cause almost all highway
crashes and the resulting tragic casualties. The generally accepted number
is 85%, based on multi-disciplinary "accident" investigation
studies. The exact proportion is not really important. We know it is big,
and we know it is not easy to fix. There are some fundamental human characteristics
that make us less capable and less cautious as drivers than we would like.
I'm going to summarize what we know about why drivers usually discount
risks and a little about what we can do about it. To understand the problem
and start thinking about more effective fixes we have to look closely
at the wacky psychology of risk and the even wackier politics.
My company recently had an unusual opportunity to take a comprehensive
look at the ways of influencing the behavior of road users, particularly
drivers. We put together a multi-disciplinary team and conducted a massive
state of the art review. The intent was to advance practical understanding
of what works and what does not work in influencing road user behavior,
and why. By no means do we, or anyone else, know everything about this
horrendously complex field, but the review does give us a broad view of
what's known. I cannot here cover the full detail of what turned out to
be hundreds of pages of report, but I can hope to give some flavor of
what we found and where I think it points. First, a little history.
Active vs. passive safety: fix
the wheel or the nut holding it?
In
road safety we have passive safety strategies, which try to engineer safer
environments, and active or behavioral strategies, which try to influence
people to act more safely. A popular old saying went something like, "The
only thing wrong with cars is the nut holding the steering wheel."
This view changed in the 1960s (at least inside the Washington Beltway),
and passive approaches became dominant, partly because of the poor understanding
of driver behavior and the weak behavior-change methods used in the past.
In his influential 1965 book, Ralph Nader wrote: "...our society
knows a great deal more about building safer machines than it does about
getting people to behave safely in an almost infinite variety of driving
situations that are overburdening the drivers' perceptual and motor capacities...Vehicle
deficiencies are more important to correct than human inadequacies simply
because they are easier to analyze and remedy." And he goes on to
get pretty explicit, " ... whether motorists are momentarily careless
or intoxicated, or are driving normally when they are struck by another
vehicle is entirely irrelevant to the responsibility of the automobile
makers to build safer cars." Nader could have added highway authorities
and roads as well, but maybe taking on these government bureaucracies
was too much even for him.
The early days of the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
(NHTSA), the Highway Safety Act and the resulting emphasis on crash protection
standards were a result of looking at the problem this way. It was probably
not even true that we knew better how to make cars safer at that time.
Many motor vehicle safety standards were "technology forcing"
standards, which required performance beyond what the industry knew how
to design. It was politically acceptable to put this kind of pressure
on safer vehicle design, because accountability was localized in a few
privately owned manufacturers. Rarely would such pressure on safe behavior
by drivers ever be acceptable, because responsibility for this is highly
diffused over various government agencies.
Road safety was not unique in deciding that passive measures offered the
best payoff. Public health had a similar history, of course, starting
much earlier. As we entered the industrial age, passive public health
measures such as public water treatment and sewage disposal had the greatest
impacts on health. Environmental health is still an issue, but now we
look more to individual choices and healthy lifestyle changes for major
improvements in public health.
We have not reached the end of safety improvements to vehicles and roads-far
from it. There are many opportunities for better occupant protection and
crash avoidance, and whole new fields, like Intelligent Vehicle Highway
Systems, are going to open up further opportunities. Especially in some
roadway areas such as signing, there is a long way to go before we can
say it is even pretty good. Even in vehicle design, there are some sour
notes in the generally happy tune. The last two big vehicle changes, airbags
and ABS, have had major problems, and these problems are to some extent
behavioral. We enjoy the benefits of safer vehicles and roads, but it
is clear we really do have to get smarter about understanding and managing
driver behavior to maintain real progress.
The psychology of risk-weird science
Fortunately,
psychology and safety research can now provide useful understanding of
drivers and point us to effective use of influence tools. But first, why
is it important to understand how people behave on the road and why they
behave they way they do? Well, it is terribly important, because our understanding
of the driver's mind provides us with the assumptions that underlie the
way we design safety programs and allocate resources.
If we are unclear or wrong about how drivers think and what their motives
are, our attempts to educate or influence them will be ineffective. This
is not only important to safety bureaucrats, but to everybody who has
responsibility for influencing others to drive more safely, from the manager
of a thousand truck drivers to the operator of a small sales or service
fleet, and even to the parents of teenage drivers.
What we see when we look at driver behavior depends, of course, on where
we are looking from. There are a lot of different approaches to understanding
the driver, but I think they mostly boil down to two opposing approaches.
Either we take risks because we don't realize we are taking them, or because
we are willing to accept them.
The first is the "human factors" or "ergonomics" approach.
Human factors psychologists and engineers see the driver as an information
processor and performer of a set of skills. These nice folks say that
us drivers are nice too, that we are well meaning and usually trying to
do the right thing. It's just that sometimes the demands of the driving
task exceed our capabilities-that is, they think we are good people but
stupid drivers.
In human factors R&D, they study how a typical, "average"
person can perform and, since we do not all have identical capacities
and limitations, they look at the range of differences between individuals.
There is a lot to be said for this approach. It's important to keep in
mind that the human race did not grow up driving cars-until a couple of
hundred years ago the fastest anybody ever went was swinging on a vine.
We humans have many remarkable abilities, but we also have some severe
limitations in our ability to perceive all the risks involved in driving.
The human factors people look at what can be done to vehicles and roadway
environments to reduce the demands on our limited perceptual and mental
capacities. As an example of a practical application of this approach-I
do some human factors consulting for lawyers and insurance companies in
crash litigation cases. I study questions of what the drivers were able
to do in a crash situation. What could they see? How fast could they be
expected to react? Did the drivers' failures result from some basic human
limitation of perception or from a failure of judgment? This work is very
interesting but very frustrating, because the legal system has trouble
understanding the difference between the science of drivers' capacities/limitations
and common sense ideas about how drivers operate in real life.
Putting aside the frustrations of trying to present drivers as nice people
in an ugly world, lets look at the second approach to understanding the
driver, where I now mostly work. This is the not-so-nice approach of the
economist, the criminologist, the lawyer, the traffic cop, some psychologists,
and crabby, pessimistic folk in general. As one researcher put it, this
approach is "to view the driver as a bundle of motivations."
These crabby, pessimistic point of view tends to say that we drivers,
whatever our basic limitations, could all be safer if we just cared enough
to try harder-that is, they think we're good enough drivers but stupid
people.
The crabby-pessimistic motivation folks are obsessed with questionable
values, decisions, and motives on the part of drivers. Their main excuse
for this misanthropic view is that driving is a self-paced task. That
is, most of the time as we drive, it is our own actions which determine
the difficulty of the task and the risk that we experience. This means,
of course, that our motivation is more important than our capacities and
limitations in contributing to risk. What we are able to do as drivers
and what we choose to do are often very different-for instance, every
driver is capable of driving at the speed limit but many choose not to
do it.
In recent years, the motivational camp has become even more slanderous
in its slagging of the human character. Some think that drivers will start
to take more risk to compensate for vehicle and roadway improvements made
by the nice guys. This goes around under different aliases: risk compensation,
danger adaptation, risk homeostasis, and even the vicious sounding "moral
hazard". This depressing view of things seems to have taken hold
in Canada and Europe.
The motivational approach isn't all bad news and crabbiness, however.
There are some constructive and practical steps implied by the approach.
An example in our own work is the design of safety incentive programs
to motivate fleet drivers to try harder. Incentive programs are used widely
in industrial safety and, when designed right, they can be very effective.
So it does seem that people can be safer, in some circumstances, if they
are motivated to be safer by some small reward.
Abilities vs. motives-which is it?
So
who is right here, the cheery human factors guys or the depressing motivation
guys? The truly sad and complicated truth is that they both are. On the
road, some drivers who seem highly motivated to be safe, such as the elderly,
crash a lot because of special limitations on their capacities. Some drivers
with high skills and capacities, such as amateur racers, also have high
crash rates on the roads. The highest risk drivers-young beginners-crash
both because they have limited abilities to perceive hazards and judge
risk, and especially because they are not very motivated to avoid risks.
Indeed, they may be motivated to seek risks and the benefits that come
from taking them. (See Michael Apter's book The Dangerous Edge: The Psychology
of Excitement, for a convincing discussion of how fundamental risk taking
is.) Average drivers are at moderate risk both because of modest abilities
and modest motivation to avoid risk.
(Editor's note: The Dangerous Edge is out of print and may be unavailable)
Is risky driving normal?
Whatever
perspective on the driver we choose, it is clear that the vast majority
of deaths and injuries on the roads are caused by the actions of "normal"
drivers, as opposed to those who can be identified as deviant, abnormal,
or particularly "bad" drivers. Certainly there are all too many
chronic bad risks, but they are only a small part of the total problem.
This challenges our understanding and creates real difficulties for management
of efforts to reduce the problem. Should we focus on the highest risk
minority or the moderate risk majority? This question has major political
implications that we'll get to in a minute.
Surprisingly little is known about the details of normal driver behaviors
that lead to the vast majority of collisions. If we look at individual
cases, we can see specific errors, but we can rarely see why this error,
which is probably very common, perhaps even "normal", led to
a crash this time and not the other gazillion times it was committed.
This limits the current choice of priority behaviors targeted for change
to obvious general categories of behavior-such as impaired driving, speeding,
tailgating and the current big fads, aggressive driving and "road
rage."
Routine collision reports are not specific or precise enough to be of
much help. Better report forms and training of police crash investigators
could help a lot. Special, in-depth collision studies have pointed strongly
to failures in attentiveness and hazard detection as leading causes of
crashes, but even these findings have limits. If a driver failed to perceive
a hazard, was it because of some limit to perceptual skills or because
attention was directed elsewhere? If the driver was not paying adequate
attention, what was he/she doing? Did failure of attention occur from
carelessness, or did the driving situation place too much demand on the
drivers' attention switching capabilities? Could it be some of both?
Motivation
Normal drivers are motivated to behave
in ways that they think are useful to their best interests. That's pretty
much what normal means. One of the most fundamental traits of normal people
is adaptability. They respond to changes in the environment to achieve
certain outcomes-what an economist or cognitive psychologist would call
"expected utility". Normally, nobody wants to be injured, so
a safe trip is an important priority. But (and this is a very important
but) there are always other priorities to be traded off against safety.
Many other motives are considered in the decisions leading to drivers'
behaviors, ranging from practical trip purposes to the sheer thrill of
speed, and many motives in between. It is clear that we are willing to
accept a certain amount of risk in return for the benefits of mobility.
If we weren't, we would just stay home (although that has its own risks).
Once we are on the road, we can choose between cautious behavior and risky
behavior in most any situation. Each choice has certain benefits and costs.
Drivers' risk decisions result from the balance between the costs and
benefits of choosing either a safer or less safe option. The Canadian
risk psychologist Gerald Wilde uses the term "target risk" to
indicate a preferred risk level that we try to maintain as conditions
change. (See Wilde's book Target Risk for a full discussion.) Risk acceptance
decisions are thought to be based on a decision matrix like the one below.
Matrix (to be supplied)
A great many different motives could be shown in the matrix, and some
motives may be relevant to some drivers and not others. For instance,
thrill seeking or impressing friends are usually stronger motives for
young drivers than for the elderly. Even for the same driver, motives
may change from trip to trip. Saving time, for instance, is highly motivating
when we are late for an important appointment.
Real risk and subjective risk
It
is important to keep in mind that many of the costs and benefits that
motivate our decisions are not certain, and some of them are much less
certain than others. For instance, speeding is likely to get us to our
appointment earlier, more likely than it is to get us a speeding ticket.
What's more, we don't usually know what the real odds are. For getting
tickets, this is probably good, because we generally think the odds are
higher than they really are. We make our decisions based on what we think
the odds are (subjective risk), and this is likely to be pretty loosely
connected to the real odds, especially when these are very small. On any
given trip, the odds of anything bad happening are low, even for inept
and careless drivers.
Optimism bias and control illusion
As
normal people, most drivers also have a tendency to excess optimism. In
its extreme form we see this as the legendary "invulnerability"
feelings of youth. But it is normal to feel that things are going to work
out OK for us. "Optimism bias", as the psychologists call it,
is probably wired into the normal human, and it helps us discount the
risk of coming to harm. We learn a related mental aberration, called "control
illusion", which means we think we have more control than we really
do have. Every time we get away with a risky action, we learn that we
can control things even when we're doing what we have been told is dangerous-for
example, "speed kills", but we get away with speeding on a regular
basis. Our roadway system is pretty forgiving, and it teaches us through
our own experience that the chances of serious injury, for us, are pretty
close to zero. We must be special. As drivers we almost all think we are
better than average, and our feelings of being in control help us discount
the real risks we face.
Our optimistic illusions have an interesting side effect that makes safety
education tougher. Say we are shown lots of convincing, objective information
about the size and horror of the road crash problem. "Yup,"
we say, "the country really has a big problem, I'm sure glad it doesn't
apply to me." There is a strong tendency to depersonalize big societal
problems like road safety because, well, "I'm special and I'm going
to be OK." It's another way we discount the danger in the risks that
we routinely take.
Motivation: up close and personal
To
help us behave in ways that treat risks more realistically, we have to
find some effective motivational handles. We have tried to break motivation
down a bit to make sure we don't miss too many possibilities. Two fundamental
kinds of motivation seem important, personal and social.
Personal motives are our individual drives and needs: that is, what we
want to get for ourselves (or avoid) through our actions. These personal
motives can originate internally or externally. Internal personal motivators
include such things as personal values, personal mobility, need for self
protection, emotional reactions, need for autonomy, fun and thrills, and
so forth. Since these motives come from inside, there is not too much
we can do to create or eliminate them. We can sometimes support the positive
ones or at least help people to pay more attention to them. In this, as
in so many things, we teach best by providing a good example.
External personal motivators are those imposed on us from outside. These
include such things as feedback, approval, incentives, and disincentives.
The last, in the form of threatened punishment, has traditionally been
the main way to influence drivers' motives. This is not good, since punishment
is a notoriously poor motivator, unless it is swift, reasonably severe,
and very certain. Of these, certainty is the most important; you can increase
the severity of a penalty with no effect if the chances of getting caught
are low. As with any risk, people seem to multiply the severity of the
consequences by the probability of receiving them and make their decision
based on the size of the result. For example, if the fine for a speeding
violation is $100 but the chances of receiving it is one in a thousand
times that we speed, then we act as if the risk of penalty was pretty
close to zero. External motivators can be very powerful (as in a gun to
the head), but their effect on behavior is often temporary.
Social motives are those in which we consider needs, benefits, and costs
beyond ourselves. Social motivators are what we want for our friends and
family, our community or workplace, and the state or the nation. They
can include feelings of responsibility for others, community values, leadership
or role modeling. A successful practical application of these motives
is "active caring," a program concept used in industrial safety
by the Virginia Tech psychologist Scott Geller. It promotes an active
concern for the safety of others, since Scott thinks we will likely never
be very good at overcoming excess optimism about our own risks. For many,
it may be easier to change our behavior to protect others than to protect
ourselves.
The social and political mentality of
risk
Choices
about risk also occur at the community, state, and national level. As
a society we decide how much loss we are willing to accept in exchange
for how much freedom and mobility. The overall level of road crash risk
that currently enjoyed (or suffered) is the balance of what is decided
about all the factors that could help or hurt road safety. The behavior
of corporate and governmental organizations are important parts of this
balance. Overall risk is the net effect of a great many corporate, bureaucratic,
and political decisions, and these decisions are based the benefits and
costs perceived by organizations.
To change the level of road safety, we have to disturb the current balance.
Even before we get started, natural, unplanned trends in society may disturb
the balance for us. For instance, current demographic trends mean larger
numbers of both elderly and young drivers are entering the driving population,
and both groups crash a lot. Also, collision deaths, and maybe driving
behavior, are influenced by the business cycle. Certainly, the numbers
of fatal crashes go up and down very precisely with economic indicators.
Our prolonged period of economic growth should also raise risk over the
next few years. Boom times lead to optimism, perhaps on the road as well
as at the brokerages. Maybe they also lead to impatience, since time is
money, and it's even more money in good times. Some of the current problems
with increased aggressive driving, if real, may be influenced by our current
economic expansion.
A large number of factors influence what drivers choose to do, ranging
from behavior genetics to visual perception to the economy. We can only
do something about a small proportion of these. We can not, for instance,
create a recession to reduce deaths on the roads.
Drivers are also citizens. Most of us are content with our own behavior,
so it is difficult to impose influences that are perceived to be onerous
for us normal drivers. We are all in favor of safety, but not if it is
too inconvenient, especially since we don't think the overall risk really
applies to us anyway. Punitive or inconvenient influences that are strong
enough to produce behavioral change will be seen as onerous, unless they
are directed to groups that are perceived to be deviant. While popular
and expedient, the impact of addressing only deviant drivers is limited,
even if it is effective, because of the small numbers involved. This may
be the "Catch 22" of road safety management.
Legislation, enforcement, education,
and reinforcement
So
how do we go about disturbing normal drivers enough to change their behavior?
Certainly there are lots of perspectives on behavior change in road safety.
The different professional disciplines involved, different schools of
thought, and different ideologies all shape diverse approaches to behavior
change. Everyone seems to think they understand influencing drivers pretty
well. I'm constantly being told by some well meaning soul, "If only
they would (fill in the blank), drivers (that is, other drivers) will
smarten up and the problem will be solved."
There are four main tools for influencing driver behavior: 1) Legislation,
that is laws and rules; 2) Enforcement, that is supervision and surveillance;
3) Education, including training, advertising and promotion; and 4) Reinforcement,
which is the short term we use for behavior analysis methods, such as
incentives, feedback, etc. Much evidence suggests that these big influence
tools are rarely used to the maximum of their capability, and most programs,
sad to say, are probably ineffective. As safety professionals we maintain
our pride and optimism mostly by neglecting to evaluate programs. Lets
take a quick look at how these tools work and how we can make them work
better.
Legislation codifies society's expectations and standards, and rules and
regulations attempt to control most aspects of road user behavior. While
pretty intrusive, highway law is accepted as being justified by the greater
common good as part of the privilege of using the public roads. The legislative
framework allocates responsibility for road transport regulation and road
user behavior to different levels of government, and to various agencies
within them. It tells us what to do and who should be accountable for
ensuring that we do it. But how does it actually work?
Legislation has two possible ways of influencing our behavior. First is
through "deterrence," in which behavior changes to avoid the
threat of punishment. Deterrence is, of course, quite dependent on enforcement,
which discounts its effect through low subjective risk of being caught.
The second way legislation influences behavior is through its educational
or moral power. Legal theorists call this the "declarative"
effect. This effect is dependent upon education, publicity, and communication.
When well communicated, laws inform us about what our community values
and expects of us, or would like to expect of us. Leonard Evans, a researcher
at GM, put it well when he wrote, "Legislative interventions partly
reflect social norms, and partially influence them; it is often unclear
which is the cart and which is the horse".
Legislation by itself has limited effect on road users' behavior, probably
less effect than most people think. Typically, new legislation has an
initial impact, because people overestimate the deterrent threat. As publicity
tapers off, the exaggerated deterrent threat usually wears off after a
few months. This is repeated over and over again. There may, however,
be subtle long-term or cumulative effects on social norms, at least for
some types of legislation. It is conceivable that a lot of rules and publicity
efforts, each of which is ineffective on its own, adds up to some mysterious
effect on social norms. This may have happened with DWI.
Legislative interventions need more support and maintenance. The tools
for support and maintenance can be found in enforcement, reinforcement,
and education. Effective enforcement supervision is needed to create a
credible deterrent and to encourage development of safe habits of compliance.
Reinforcement techniques, such as prompts, feedback, and incentives can
enhance motivation and encourage habit formation. Education is needed
to promote knowledge, skills, and attitude changes, and to feed the development
of internal and informal social controls. More comprehensive, coordinated
support for legislative objectives, using a combination of influences,
would be helpful in encouraging safer behavior.
Enforcement brings concrete reality to legislation. It threatens penalties,
and with some probability, delivers them. The threat of penalties creates
two kinds of deterrence. First is "specific deterrence", changing
the later behavior of individuals who receive a penalty. Second is "general
deterrence". The threat of penalties is known in advance, so it presents
a disincentive for actions that have not yet happened. A disincentive
has its effects before the punishment is delivered, so enforcement can
have a "general deterrent" effect, influencing the behavior
of those who have not yet received any sanction.
Enforcement presence has dramatic short-range effects. Even an empty threat
can have a big effect, for a while. The day that photo radar signs went
up on Ontario freeways, everybody was driving at the speed limit, even
though the program had not started yet. It was spooky, but it only lasted
for a day or two. Unfortunately, there is rarely enough surveillance for
this effect to make a significant contribution to road safety on its own.
The "halo effects" of visible surveillance can extend the perceived
threat, and this may contribute to general deterrence. Specific deterrence
is restricted by the weakness of punishment as a behavioral influence
and by the low chances of repeat violators being detected.
Competing priorities for police resources may lock routine surveillance
into a game-theory equilibrium with offenders: more enforcement leads
to less violations, which leads to less enforcement, and so on. Selective
Traffic Enforcement Programs (STEPs) combine enforcement blitzes with
education and publicity, and they can break out of the game, at least
in the short term. Automated surveillance show promise for longer-term
impacts. Ontario's photo radar program was poorly designed and failed,
both for political reasons. Which just goes to show that it is hard to
do anything that is really effective if it inconveniences normal drivers.
The very effectiveness of automated enforcement could also lead to reductions
in other types of surveillance unless the incentives for police agencies
are altered with respect to traffic enforcement.
Reinforcement is used here as an umbrella term to subsume incentive/reward
and other aspects of behavior-analysis technology. These behavioral techniques
are powerful when used properly. Behavior change is more likely when directly
encouraged by means of reinforcement than more indirectly through attempts
to change knowledge and attitudes. Reinforcement directly attacks the
specific “causes” of behavior.
The best programs make effective use of the basic behavioral influences:
rewards and punishments, incentives and disincentives, cues and prompts,
commitment and participation, and feedback. This is the meat and potatoes
of behavioral psychology. Psychologists know that positive, rewarding
outcomes, encourage desirable behaviors more reliably than negative, punitive
outcomes discourage undesirable behaviors.
Better understanding and application of environmental cues and prompts
holds promise as useful influences. Incentives are shown to be powerful
influences in the short term and can be used to enhance self-control of
behavior for the long term. Simple feedback, even without rewards, is
shown to have a substantial impact on some behaviors, such as belt use.
I see transfer and refinement of behavioral technologies to routine operations
as the main challenge of road safety management for the foreseeable future.
Education encompasses a large and diverse set of techniques aimed at influencing
driver behavior. A lot of faith has been placed in safety education programs.
However, the traditional approach, which was simply to place information
before a passive audience, has proven to be ineffective in changing behavior.
Classroom education applies to new and elderly drivers, violators, and
some "regular" drivers, especially if they are part of a corporate
fleet. Properly designed training provides practice and feedback, so behavior-change
potential is strong. However, sound evaluations and demonstrated effectiveness
in changing behavior are relatively rare. Nevertheless, intensive, face-to-face,
interactive training techniques show good potential, even with adults.
Public education and advertising promotions are widespread. They are limited
in the behaviors they can address and the amount of information they can
deliver. They lack the critical features of practice, two-way interaction,
and feedback, so their behavior-change potential is limited. As traditionally
practised, they attempt to change attitudes, and they have little demonstrable
effect on their own. However, if properly designed and targeted they have
a strong role to play in broader programs. Public relations and news coverage
can have very wide, if somewhat shallow, impact, and they have potential
for influence beyond that now realized. News coverage in particular is
a weak link in the road safety chain.
Evaluation is especially important in education, where programs seem so
obviously desirable, effective, and non-threatening. Education is nice;
it doesn't bother anybody. The possibility of negative effects also makes
evaluation critical for education programs. As in other potentially-effective
behavioral technologies, there is no guarantee of either effectiveness
or harmlessness, and the effects must be carefully tracked to avoid wasting
resources or causing harm. Some approaches to driver training can make
more crashes. Existing theory and data can be used to design useful programs
of all types of safety education. All types can achieve useful (if limited)
objectives, if they are designed, implemented, evaluated, and refined
according to best practice and behavioral principals.
Is a little safety always a good thing?
Certainly,
we should not give up on influencing driver behavior, just because it
is tough, but it must be done better. We should not succumb to "optimism
bias" in program planning, but be realistic about what it really
takes. If we are not ready to give what it takes, we should say so and
back off. Pretending to influence driver safety is tempting for PR and
political reasons. We are always saying, "All this suffering is intolerable,
something has to be done!" We should change this to "something
effective has to be done".
Keep in mind that ineffective safety measures make the world safer for
bureaucracy, but they are actually harmful for the rest of us. They trick
us into thinking that something useful is being done, preventing other
actions which could actually be effective. We have limited mental and
financial resources. Ineffective programs use up those resources just
as fast as good programs, without producing any offsetting savings from
loss reduction. So, what would it take to get more effective influence
programs?
Organizational behavior change
The
big problem is not that we don't know how to influence and change behavior
to be safer-we do. We can do it in special pilot projects quite nicely.
The problem is that we don't know how to change the behavior of the organizations
that could deliver enough influence to make a difference. The critical
issues for behavioral safety programs are coordination, evaluation, and
accountability. Coordination is critical because the multicausal nature
of driver behavior requires multifaceted programs for effective change.
Coordination of programs, however, runs against organizational boundaries
and bureaucratic interests. This expands behavior change to include the
tougher problems of organizational behavior change. Safety management
may have to find out what various stakeholder organizations need to support
their own specific objectives and help provide it as exchange for the
organizations' support of safety objectives. Organizations respond to
incentives and disincentives as reliably as do individuals.
Evaluation is critical for all behavioral programs. No behavioral program,
however carefully planned, can be assumed to work without hard data. The
influence process is too complex to rely on simple program standards or
cookbook solutions. If there is to be progress in driver safety management,
it will be knowledge driven. The knowledge for continued refinement of
behavioral methods will only become available through objective evaluation.
All behavior change methods should be seen as experimental.
Accountability for safety outcomes is critical because organizations,
like individuals, will only change when they are motivated to do so. The
“payoffs” received by organizations with responsibility for driver safety
are rarely connected to success in reducing the severity of the problem.
Transfer of behavioral technology, coordination of multifaceted programs,
and the evaluation and refinement of interventions are unlikely under
existing organizational structures. Techniques of organizational behavior
change are needed to support individual behavior change as part of effective
driver safety management.
Who's to blame?
It's
easy to point accusing fingers, but there is plenty of blame to go around.
Governments are congenitally weak when it comes to leaning on the average
driver/voter. They will make a lot of noise beating on industry, drunks,
and road-rage nut cases, but they will go pretty easy on you and me. Responsibility
for safety is neatly spread around different agencies and levels of government,
so there is little meaningful coordination or accountability. Do bureaucrats
ever get fired or promoted based on some real measure of effectiveness?
Not very often. Drug problems get a war and a czar to run it. Driver behavior
problems get wishful thinking and buck passing.
If I could order one thing to be done for road safety, it would be to
smarten up the news media. They are seriously ignorant of technical aspects
of driver safety and incompetently uncritical of poor information and
lame programs. Of course, we the customers must share the rap with the
media, because we buy weak reporting and safety window dressing. Maybe
the media are just giving us what we want; to be reassured that something
is being done and not to be bothered too much. After all, we're optimistic
that it's not going to happen to us, because we are in control. • |
|
