Psychological correlates of car use: A meta-analysis

By Benjamin Gardner, C. Abraham. 2008

268 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This meta-analysis synthesised quantitative research into potentially modifiable psychological correlates of car use and intentions to drive. Online psychology and transportation databases were searched, and inclusion criteria applied to potentially relevant records. An ancestry approach was also employed to search selected publications. Meta-analyses of effect size rs were performed on 23 unique study datasets. Results generally supported the predictive utility of variables derived from the Theory of Planned Behaviour, though cognitions towards not driving displayed uniformly larger effects than were observed for car use cognitions. There was also a strong effect of habit on behaviour. Support for effects of pro-environment cognitions on driving was weak. However, a dearth of available evidence limited our findings and precludes development of clear evidence-based recommendations for intervention design. Directions for future research are discussed.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a310d7aafc68677505e97f11707d96c2dbeb4efd

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In Applied Psychology

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

In Transportation

Citations in the corpus

Behaviour Theory and Soft Transport Policy Measures (2011, background): “Gardner and Abraham (2008) reported the results of a metaanalyses of 23 studies of psychological determinants of car-use reduction.”
Mood and mode: does how we travel affect how we feel? (2014, background): “Gardner and Abraham (2007) find that auto travelers have more positive affect than transit travelers due to perceived (if not always actual) reliability, punctuality, effortlessness, etc. Ory et al. (2004) find that those who travel by bus are significantly less likely to like their commute trips.”
Shedding light on the psychological and behavioral determinants of travel mode choice: A meta-analysis (2017, unknown): “While the predictive capability of TPB proved to be good (Armitage & Conner, 2001; Sutton, 1998), the relative importance of the constructs as antecedents of travel mode choice varies across studies (Gardner & Abraham, 2008).”
What encourages people to carpool? An evaluation of factors with meta-analysis (2017, methodology): “However, moderator analysis is only suitable for meta-analysis where there is a large sample size of studies, k (Gardner and Abraham 2008).”
Who will buy electric vehicles? Identifying early adopters in Germany (2014, background): “Research on hybrid vehicles has demonstrated that users are usually neither able to nor really interested in calculating the economic efficiency of vehicles (Turrentine and Kurani, 2007; Feiler and Soll, 2010; Gardner and Abraham, 2008).”
Is the intention to use public transport for different travel purposes determined by different factors (2016, methodology): “The TPB has been applied in the transport and environmental psychology field (e.g. Bamberg et al., 2003; Gardner and Abraham, 2008; Eriksson and Forward, 2011).”
What cognitive mechanisms predict travel mode choice? A systematic review with meta-analysis (2017, background): “…how interventions could effectively promote alternative travel mode choices, researchers have investigated several predictors of car use and alternative travel modes including, geographic (Park, Kang, & Choi, 2014), economic (Frank, 2004) and psychological factors (Gardner & Abraham, 2008).”