Forgetting near-accidents: The roles of severity, culpability and experience in the poor recall of dangerous driving situations

It is often assumed that real-life events such as minor road accidents and near accidents will be well remembered. However, surveys of self-reported a ccidents suggest that respondents apparently forget approximately one third of their road accidents each year. This paper explores this possibility by looking at memory for the near-accidents in which drivers are involved. In a pilot study drivers carried microcassette recorders in their cars and re ported near-accidents after each journey. These data confirmed that the fre quency of near-accidents is greatly underestimated when subjects are simply asked to recall them, The main study then compared reports and recalls of over 7000 car journeys from 80 subjects over the course of a year. These in cluded more than 400 reports or recalls of near-accidents. The influences o f the driver's experience, the severity of the near-accident, and the: driv er's; self-perceived degree of blame were additionally explored. It is conc luded that near-accidents are generally forgotten extremely rapidly, with a n estimated 80% of incidents being no longer reported after a delay of up t o two weeks. Serious near-accidents and those where the driver admitted bei ng to blame in the incident were least likely to be forgotten. Copyright (C ) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.