A collaboration announced yesterday evening between international tyre company Goodyear and specialist social science university the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) will involve an innovative road safety research project examining the social behaviour of road users across Europe.
The project, managed by LSE Consulting, will seek to identify how drivers influence each other's behaviour on the road in order to use empirical insights to find solutions to the road safety debate in Europe.
"Current road safety research is largely focused upon how drivers use their vehicles within a physical, as opposed to social, environment," explained Dr. Chris Tennant, who is leading the research project at LSE. "With our new research project we want to analyse drivers’ interactions with and their attitudes towards other drivers and their effect on risky driving. Our team of researchers at LSE’s Department of Social Psychology is excited about the opportunity to use the latest research techniques in social psychology to approach road safety from an angle that hasn’t been emphasised so much before."
Goodyear Vice President, consumer tires in Europe, Middle East and Africa, Olivier Rousseau, added: "LSE’s Department of Social Psychology has produced ground-breaking research into the behaviour of individuals in social settings for 50 years. We are thrilled that we are able to work with one of the world’s leading research authorities on a study that has the potential to yield valuable insights and information into the road safety debate."
Goodyear stated that it hoped the co-operation would represent a further contribution to the road safety debate through new statistics and research projects that initiate recommendations on how to better tackle this important societal issue. The project will follow previous surveys conducted by Goodyear on novice drivers (2012), driving instructors (2013), and parents of novice drivers (2014) which led to the publication of a white paper ‘Driving Safety First: Improving road safety for novice drivers'. The report, a second edition of which was published in November 2014, has been shared with and drawn on by policy-makers and road safety organisations in efforts to make European roads safer.
Part of the research project with LSE is a pan-European study of driver behaviour across 15 countries, which should provide new information to feed into Goodyear’s long-supported idea of lifelong learning as a basis for improving road safety. A large amount of Goodyear’s research and policy recommendations, such as for example the establishment of graduated licenses, have supported this philosophy.
Photo by Goodyear /LSE
