Driving, Personality and Decision-Making: A Study for Understanding Human Behavior

Because transportation is strongly linked to public health, there is a need to better understand the factors that contribute to increasing or decreasing risk-taking. For understanding behavior, several theoretical approaches can be studied such as personality or decision-making. These approaches can be seen as complementary to understanding the complexity of human behavior. Existing literature highlights the relation between personality variables and decision theory which contributes to a better understanding of decision-making. This study aims to present how personality traits and decision-making are related. The study of personality rests on the Big-Five models which highlight the following facets: excitement-seeking, anxiety, anger, altruism, and morality. To investigate the decision-making approach, starting from the game theory, a lottery with ten trials has been experimented with. Our results based on 4011 young drivers highlight the links between economic preferences, personality, and driving behavior. Some differences were found between female and male drivers.