Attributions and personality as predictors of the road rage response

This study examined the ability of attributions and personality traits to predict the emotional and behavioural components of the road rage response. Participants recalled a recent time when they experienced three different anger-provoking events when driving. They then rated their behaviours and emotions during the event, and their attributions for why the event occurred. Participants also completed a battery of personality questionnaires designed to predict their responses to the situations. Attributing causality for the anger-arousing event to a stable factor in the offending driver was uniquely related to aggressive behaviour and anger in all three situations. Hostile and blame attributions predicted aggressive behaviour and anger in different situations. In addition to dispositional measures of aggressiveness and anger predicting aggressive behaviour and anger in each of the anger-provoking situations, other personality variables were also related to aspects of the road rage response (e.g. conscientiousness, agreeableness, narcissism, and extraversion). Attributions and personality traits accounted for unique variance in the outcomes, and there were only sporadic effects of attributions partially mediating the relationships between personality variables and responses to the anger-provoking situations. Therefore, it is unlikely that the relationships between personality traits and responses to anger-provoking situations are completely mediated by attributional processing.