Personality traits and their relationship to traffic violations.

There is a relationship between personality traits of enlisted personnel at one mid-west Air Force Base and their frequency of moving violations. The 52 individuals who received one or two moving violations were more emotionally stable than the 33 non-offenders and the 18 chronic offenders. Discriminant analysis showed significant differences between the personality characteristics of the occasional offender and the other two groups, but none between the chronic offender and the non-offender. The personality characteristics of the chronic offender resembled those of Zelhart's alcoholic offender and Dunbar's "accident-prone" individual. Additional research using a more heterogeneous sample might make possible identification of the high-frequency traffic violator by means of personality characteristics measured after his first offense.