Generalized trust and traffic violations: The moderating role of the individualism dimension

Traffic crashes take well over a million lives every year and are mainly caused by driver behavior and traffic violations. Drivers' attitudes and beliefs are at the root of whether traffic violations will be committed, making it important to explore what contributes to disobedience of traffic law. Generalized trust is one of the most influential factors in interpersonal behavior but has not yet been studied empirically in the context of driving behavior in general, and traffic violations in specific. Using data from about 30,000 participants from 20 European countries, this study examines the relationship between generalized trust and committing traffic violations while paying attention to differences between countries scoring high and low in individualism. A multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression analysis shows that in countries with high individualism scores, the probability to commit traffic violations increases significantly as generalized trust increases, while the association between generalized trust and traffic violations decreases as the country's individualism level decreases. The findings and their implications are discussed with suggestions for future research.