Claus B, Warlop L
Department of Marketing and Sales Management, IESEG School of Management, 3 rue de la Digue, 59000 Lille, France.
Department of Marketing, BI Norwegian Business School, Nydalsveien 37, 0484 Oslo, Norway.
J Consum Policy (Dordr). 2022;45(2):331-342. doi: 10.1007/s10603-022-09511-w. Epub 2022 Feb 5.
Car traffic and accidents involving cars create an enormous societal cost, particularly in terms of negative consequences for public health. Mitigating these effects is a daily concern for public and private institutions and people around the world. At least a subset of accidents is attributable to the amount of risk drivers allow in their driving and in related behaviour like mobile phone use or substance abuse. Our study looks at the effect of car size on risk taking. While literature highlights several behavioural effects of car size, the direction of causality of these effects is not always clear, and empirical evidence is lacking. Two behavioural and consequential studies support that car size affects risk taking in driving and that this increase in risk taking generalizes to other domains as well. Based on these results and in line with literature showing that social stability and security can affect financial risk taking, we propose the "car cushion hypothesis." This hypothesis suggests that bigger cars make people feel more secure, which affects their behaviour in terms of generalized risk taking. We discuss policy implications aimed at contributing to reducing the societal and public health cost of car traffic.
汽车交通以及涉及汽车的事故造成了巨大的社会成本，尤其是对公众健康产生的负面影响。减轻这些影响是世界各地公共和私人机构以及人们日常关注的问题。至少一部分事故可归因于驾驶员在驾驶过程中以及在使用手机或药物滥用等相关行为中所允许的风险程度。我们的研究着眼于汽车尺寸对冒险行为的影响。虽然文献强调了汽车尺寸的几种行为影响，但这些影响的因果关系方向并不总是明确的，而且缺乏实证证据。两项行为和结果研究支持汽车尺寸会影响驾驶中的冒险行为，并且这种冒险行为的增加也会扩展到其他领域。基于这些结果，并与表明社会稳定和安全会影响金融冒险行为的文献一致，我们提出了“汽车缓冲假说”。该假说表明，更大的汽车会让人们感觉更安全，这会影响他们在普遍冒险行为方面的表现。我们讨论了旨在有助于降低汽车交通的社会和公共健康成本的政策含义。
