Control motivation and young drivers' decision making

Abstract

Within the theoretical framework of control motivation, the effect of transient motivational variations (extrinsic to driving) on decision making in a simulated driving task was investigated. Young male drivers (mean age= 20.5 years), who were either novices or more experienced, participated in two experiments. In the first study (n = 45), the participants firstly carried out a reasoning task, extrinsic to driving, in which they randomly either failed (high control motivation), succeeded (low control motivation) or made aesthetic judgments with no evaluation in terms of success or failure (control group). Later, the participants had to decide whether to modify the given speed of a same vehicle for 38 driving situations presented in slide form. These situations were sorted into four categories according to the presence or absence of other road users and the presence or absence of an intersection. Compared with the control group, the participants of the failure group decide to make more speed changes as a function of the categories of driving situations and choose to make greater decelerations. Success leads the novices to discriminate less between the different categories of driving situations when making speed changes. A second study (n = 60) assessed whether high control motivation systematically induces a safer decision. The same driving task as in the first study was introduced by an instruction which made salient a representation of driving as being either cooperative or competitive. Whatever the instruction, the same results were found with the more experienced drivers: previous failure induces greater deceleration than success does. The opposite is observed for novices when driving was presented as a competitive activity, especially for intersection situations with no visible users. This discussion presents the usefulness of control motivation for understanding the drivers' regulation of their motivational states (allocation of attentional resources) and their representation of risk.

Keywords:

• Motivation Control Driving Speed Driving Experience Decision