Dual nature of sensation seeking in driving situations: Relationship with risky driving and mental workload
archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified
Get this paper ↗ (DOI — opens at the source; we link to it, we don't host it)
Summary
This study investigates the dual nature of sensation seeking in driving contexts, challenging the traditional view that only high sensation seeking contributes to risky behavior. Motivated by persistent traffic accident rates and the need to understand personality-driven risks across different age groups, the research examines how both high and low levels of sensation seeking relate to risky driving, mental workload, human error, and accident history. The authors hypothesized that high sensation seekers would engage in risky driving leading to errors, while low sensation seekers would experience higher mental workload, also leading to errors. The study employed a cross-sectional survey design with 312 drivers divided into three age groups: young (18–24 years), middle-aged (39–49 years), and older (65+ years), with 104 participants in each group. Participants were selected to ensure an equal number of drivers with and without accident experience in the past three years. Data were collected via web survey using validated scales for sensation seeking, risky driving (specifically speed-seeking), mental workload, and human error. Path analyses were conducted for each age group to test the hypothesized relationships between these variables. The results confirmed that high sensation seeking was positively associated with risky driving across all age groups, and risky driving significantly predicted increased human error. This supported the first hypothesis universally. However, the second hypothesis—that low sensation seeking leads to higher mental workload and subsequent error—was supported only in the older driver group. For older drivers, low sensation seeking was negatively correlated with mental workload (meaning lower sensation seeking correlated with higher workload), and higher mental workload significantly predicted human error. In contrast, for young and middle-aged drivers, the path from mental workload to human error was not significant. Additionally, an analysis of accident history revealed a significant interaction between gender and accident experience regarding risky driving; male drivers with accident histories reported higher levels of risky driving than those without. The findings demonstrate that sensation seeking has a dual nature in driving: high levels promote risk through dangerous behaviors like speeding, while low levels, particularly in older adults, increase vulnerability through cognitive overload and mental strain. The study concludes that interventions should be tailored to these distinct mechanisms. For high sensation seekers, education should focus on curbing risky behaviors, leveraging their lower mental workload as a strength. For older low sensation seekers, strategies should aim to reduce mental workload, such as through self-regulated driving habits or advanced safety technologies, to mitigate error rates. This highlights the importance of considering both extremes of personality traits in traffic safety research and policy.
Provenance
The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed.
| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | Crossref | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 3 | 2026-08-10 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| enrich | failed | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-nvidia | summ-v5 | 2 | 2026-08-10 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 10 | 2026-08-11 |
| verify | partial | — | — | — | 2 | 2026-08-10 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-nvidia on 2026-08-10; verification: verified_with_issues.
Topics
Ranked by relevance to this paper. Hover a topic for its definition.
Information type
What kind of knowledge this paper contributes, grouped by family — independent of topic (what it is about) and method (how it was studied).
- Empirical Findings: self report data
- Theoretical Contribution: theory or model, computational model