Assessing the Relation Between Emotional Intelligence and Driving Behavior: An Online Survey

Risky driving has been one among the major causes of accidents on road. Motivation behind the study was to identify if emotional intelligence influences impetuous driving in highly congested roads. Volunteers answered a 4-point online survey of questions sampled from Indian license test, driving skill and behavior questionnaires. Cronbach alpha was acceptably high validating the questions. Spearman correlation values indicated a strong correlation between driving hours and driving skill and behavior. K-means clustering was used to cluster the subjects into 4 categories based on driving skill and driving behavior scores. The cluster with highest number of subjects consisted of people who drive every day with high risky driving scores. The results suggest that people who drive everyday have poor emotional intelligence which impedes a safe driving. The study proposes that educating drivers with emotional regulation could help in safer roads.