Safer Transportation: Linking Personality Traits to Distracted Driving

The Bunun Queen, a 590-foot bulk carrier, was skimming empty from Houston to New Orleans under fair midafternoon skies when it suddenly struck Thunder.

This thunder wasn’t from the sky, but in the form of another ship—a 250-foot supply vessel headed north for Port Fourchon, Louisiana, with a cargo of oil rig equipment and parts on its main deck.

The Gulf of Mexico covers more than 600,000 square miles, but ships generally take common routes, some of which intersect like highways. Neither the Bunun Queen nor the Thunder sank on July 23, 2022—as have roughly 4,000 others scattered across the gulf’s floor—and nobody was injured, but the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) estimated the damage at $12.3 million.

The cause? Cellphone use and other distractions certainly figured heavily in the crash. But was there a psychological factor, as well?

The NTSB determined the probable cause of the collision was “the Bunun Queen officer’s distraction due to performing non-navigational tasks and the Thunder officer’s distraction due to cellphone use, which kept both officers from keeping a proper lookout. Contributing to the casualty was the Thunder’s officer on watch not following his company’s watchkeeping policies.”

With the two ships less than eight miles apart, according to the NTSB, the Thunder officer in charge of the watch was making a one-minute personal phone call that was followed by a series of voice texts. He later told investigators he was using his phone prior to the collision.

Both ships were on autopilot when two Thunder crew members spotted the Bunun Queen and notified the officer in charge, but it was too late to avoid the collision. At 1:14 p.m., according to the NTSB, the “bulbous bow of the Bunun Queen, which was traveling at 14.4 knots, struck the port side of the Thunder, which was traveling at 9 knots.”

It’s tempting to view cellphones as the primary culprit in this incident, but other underlying issues contribute to distracted driving—on water, in the air, and on land. In particular, research is increasingly uncovering the impact of personality traits as indicators of distractions that can lead to tragedy.

The problem with distractions

Fortunately, transportation-related equipment usually has safety systems to help prevent disasters resulting from distracted operators. But distractions are a significant issue across the world’s transportation sectors—not just for officers of ships, but for pilots of tugboats and airplanes, operators of forklifts, engineers on trains, and, of course, drivers on highways.

In the United States alone, 3,522 people died in 2021 and more than 360,000 were injured in motor-vehicle crashes that involved distracted drivers, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT). The DOT also reported that 8% of fatal crashes involved distracted drivers, a figure that has held relatively steady from 2017 to 2021. Motor vehicle crashes cost the economy an estimated $340 billion in 2019, the most recent year for which data was available for this report, including $98 billion that could be connected to distracted-driving crashes.

Much of the focus on distracted driving centers on handheld devices, and laws in recent years have targeted their use. Only Montana has no ban on cellphone use while driving, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Forty-eight states ban texting while driving, and 29 ban all drivers in all conditions from using handheld devices while driving.

Still, distractions come in many other forms—eating, drinking, talking to passengers (pets and children), the actions of other drivers, adjusting infotainment systems, applying cosmetics, daydreaming about why your football team lost again, drowsiness, or anything else that results, as the DOT puts it, in “inattention that occurs when drivers divert attention from the driving task to focus on some other activity.”

And despite legislative efforts, fatalities linked to distractions are not declining.

Exploring personality

The transportation sector’s enormous number of drivers (on roads, rails, and water; in the air; and in manufacturing and warehouse facilities) and its oversized impact on the economy amplify the importance among policymakers and corporate leaders of putting the brakes on distracted driving.

Research on driver personalities as a factor in distractions is relatively new and in some ways controversial. The American Psychological Association describes personality as the “individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving.” In other words, a personality is a set of unique traits and characteristics that makes us all unique.

Labels that describe personality traits number in the hundreds. One list maker, in fact, came up with 638 personality traits—from accessible to youthful, absent-minded to whimsical, abrasive to zany.

Recent research by co-author Janeth Gabaldon with Suman Niranjan focused on drivers ages 18-26, which correlates with the age group (25-34) with the most fatalities caused by distracted driving. We found four commonly used personality traits—extroversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and agreeableness—are worth noting because of how they directly influence a driver’s propensity for distracted driving behavior (DDB).

Extroverts, for instance, are more likely to commit cognitive errors, which, in turn, leads to a tendency toward DDB. This inclination often arises from a driver trying to simultaneously handle more secondary tasks than typically demanded. It can result in errors like missing a turn, braking hard to prevent a collision, or tailgating, among other manifestations.

Drivers who score high on neuroticism have an increased tendency for distracted driving. They often experience heightened anxiety, anger, and emotional instability, which may prompt them to turn to secondary tasks like using a smartphone while driving to alleviate their anxiety.

Conscientious drivers, as might be expected, are less likely to become distracted because their personalities are associated with being organized and executing tasks with care. Their tendency to be systematic, careful, and goal oriented also helps them mitigate cognitive failures (like momentary lapses in memory) that can shape the extent to which personality influences actual behavior (Sutin et al., 2020).

Drivers with the agreeableness personality trait also often mitigate the effect of cognitive failures on their propensity for distracted driving. They tend to have higher levels of cooperation and trust, and are more likely to adhere to driving regulations, thereby lessening their likelihood of distraction and risk of accidents.

The personality dilemma

Corporations love assessments. In fact, 76% of organizations with more than 100 employees use some sort of assessment as part of the $100 billion that U.S. companies spend annually on training.

The notion of using personality assessments to help decrease distracted driving, however, isn’t without challenges. There’s a lack of alignment in the scientific community, for example, on standard definitions for personality types and over whether personalities can change significantly over time.

Corporate leaders and policymakers also face the issue of discrimination—whether it’s morally or legally acceptable for personality to influence insurance rates or decisions to hire, promote, or fire employees. And how might personality apply to automated vehicles, which (so far) don’t have personalities of their own but are programmed and trained by humans who do?

Transportation work often takes place without direct managerial oversight, so identifying stable personality traits can help predict behaviors that often go unseen. Research in this area should soon be able to reliably identify personality traits to avoid when seeking to reduce distracted driving, which will help ensure transportation workers are alert, awake, on time, and not on a collision course when their paths intersect on land, in the air, or on water.

About the authors:

Janeth Gabaldon is a teaching associate professor at the University of Arkansas in the J.B. Hunt Transport Department of Supply Chain Management. She specializes in researching the behavioral aspects of supply chain management. Her focus includes human-technology interaction and driver distractions in warehouses and public transportation.

Andrew Balthrop (PhD Georgia State University) is a research associate within the Supply Chain Management Research Center at the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. His research focuses on the interaction between supply chains and public policy.

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