The Relationship between Public Attitude to Surveillance Technologies on the Road, Anxiety, Self-esteem and Driving Styles

The rapid growth of technologies provides new opportunities for efforts in traffic safety improvement and digitalization of enforcement. Public attitudes to surveillance on the road could potentially influence driving styles used in different countries and be influenced by other psychological constructs such as self-esteem and anxiety. The aim of this study is to understand if there is a relationship between public attitude to observation on the road, anxiety and self-esteem and identify these constructs relationship with driving styles in order to expand on the findings by developing intervention programs and implementation of surveillance technologies. This will in turn strengthen adherence to traffic rules as well as to the development of smart cities by taking into account the public attitude to such type of enforcement. The results revealed that public attitude to observation on the roads were negatively associated with Anxiety and three types of unsafe driving styles: Dissociative, Risky and High-velocity; positively associated with Self-esteem based contingencies of Family Support, Virtue and Competition and two types of adaptive driving styles: Patient and Careful. Anxiety was found to have a moderation effect in the relationship between public attitude to observations and Risky driving style as well as Careful driving style. The investigated self-worth contingencies have a mediation effect for two unsafe driving styles as Risky and Dissociative driving styles. Keywords: public attitude, surveillance technologies, anxiety, self-esteem, driving styles.