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. 2019 Apr:62:316-326.
doi: 10.1016/j.trf.2019.01.010. Epub 2019 Feb 5.

Learning to drive: A reconceptualization

Jessica Hafetz Mirman  1 , Allison E Curry  2 , Daniel Mirman  1
Affiliations

Learning to drive: A reconceptualization

Jessica Hafetz Mirman et al. Transp Res Part F Traffic Psychol Behav. 2019 Apr.

Abstract

Drivers' population-level crash rates incrementally decrease following licensure, which has led to the implicit assumption that an individual driver's crash risk also decreases incrementally after licensure as they accrue experience. However, in the aggregate data an incremental decrease in crash rate can reflect both incremental reductions in crash risk within individuals and an incremental increase in the proportion of drivers who have experienced an abrupt decrease in crash risk. Therefore, while it is true to say that the population of drivers' crash risk reduces in the months following licensure, it is not necessarily true to say that a driver's crash risk reduces in the months following licensure; that is, it cannot be assumed that individual-level changes in crash risk mirror the population-level changes in crash rates. In statistics, this is known as an ecological fallacy and in formal logic it is known as the fallacy of division, a type of category error. Using computational cognitive modeling methods we demonstrate that aggregating individual-level abrupt decreases in crash risk (i.e., non-incremental change trajectories) accurately fits population-level crash rate data from over 1 million adolescents and uniquely accounts for effects of two interventions found to reduce police-reported MVCs. Thus, we demonstrate that (1) a power-law artifact is readily observable in newly licensed drivers' aggregate crash data, which is not necessarily indicative of individual-level change processes, (2) interventions can alter crash risk trajectories by inducing immediate phase changes in crash risk into a lower risk stratum, or increasing the probability of such a change, (3) a phase transition model provides a stronger and more parsimonious account of the existing data than an incremental-accrual model.

Keywords: ecological fallacy; fallacy of division; phase transitions; strategic learning; teen driver safety.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Incremental and phase transition (discontinuous) models of drivers’ changing crash risk aggregate into similar patterns.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Normalized crash rates over the first two years post-licensure from four jursidictions. Points show the observed crash rates, red lines show the power law model fits, and blue lines show the phase transition model fits.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Phase transition model of the effect of the ODA on post-licensure crash rates.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Phase transition model of the effect of the RAPT program on post-licensure crash rates.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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