The fast and the furious—An experimental investigation of the pace of life and risky speed choice in traffic

Carina Goldbach, Christin Hoffmann, Julia Hoppe, Thomas Pitz and Kirsten Thommes

PLOS ONE, 2020, vol. 15, issue 7, 1-20

Abstract: Despite discernible improvements in the last decades, speeding is still a pertinent problem for road safety, fuel efficiency, and greenhouse gas mitigation. In order to understand individual speeding decisions, we need a better understanding of who speeds. In our paper, we test whether individuals' general pace of life is associated with speeding decisions. We use a novel speed-choice experiment that confronts participants with a scenario in which they repeatedly decide between driving fast or slow. This decision is associated with different accident risks. Before the experiment, each participant's pace of life was measured. Our results show that individuals with a slower pace of life are more likely to choose slow in the experiment and are also more likely to switch to slow, even when they had success by driving fast in the preliminary round. Therefore, individuals' pace of life may contribute to our understanding of speeding.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0236589 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 36589&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0236589

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0236589

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().