Measuring aggressive driving motivations: Instrument development and validation

There are a variety of different motivations that may provoke aggressive driving in individuals. Research on aggressive driving has mostly overlooked addressing these various motivations, however it can be argued that the best way to reduce aggressive driving is to understand the root causes of the behavior. These causes can be explained by individual differences in personality, specifically the characteristics of narcissistic and rigid personalities. These two types of personalities both become angry in the driving context, although they may be provoked for different reasons. To reduce aggressive driving researchers may design persuasive appeals that match these motivations. The purpose of the present research was to design an instrument that clearly measures these motives and to validate the instrument by comparing responses on the instrument to related and unrelated constructs. The Aggressive Driving Motivations Questionnaire scores evidenced good reliability, and satisfactory content and construct validity. After the instrument was validated, it was used to compare anger responses to both participant-generated and researcher-presented driving scenarios. Although both the rigid and narcissism subscales predicted higher anger responses, only the narcissism subscale successfully predicted past aggressive driving behavior. Further research using this validated narcissism sub-scale will hopefully be able to develop persuasive appeals that influence the anger and behavioral response of this type of aggressive driver