Road sharing - does it matter what road users think of each other?

What is a moral model?13be that we form a more direct connection between a bus and a likely event, andso behave as if we activated such a model without actually having to do so?There appears to be an important distinction to be made here between the roleof models in the activity of anticipation (before the event) as opposed to theactivities of explanation and evaluation (after the event).The attributions studied by Attribution Theory are part of the process ofconsciously explaining and evaluating behaviour (as were most of thestereotypes explored by Basford et al. (2002)). By contrast, the anticipationof future road situations that underpins skills like hazard perception seemsfar more likely to involve implicit, almost unconscious processes – processeswhich may be very different in their operation from the explanations given bythe same person after the event.It is not hard to see how stereotypes can play a part in decisions which allowtime for processes such as explanation and evaluation to be involved, suchas who to hire for a job, whether someone is a criminal, or who was at faultin an accident. It is much less obvious that they play a role in the mechanicsof avoiding collisions; they seem more likely to play a role in our recording ofcollisions – for instance, the ‘contributory factors’ in STATS19 (Department forTransport, 2010b).This is not to say that they definitely do not play a role. For instance, stereotypescan be linked to powerful emotions (imagine your feelings meeting different kindsof people in a dark alley at night) which in turn might have direct consequencesfor behaviour about which we understand little in a road safety context.The question has not yet been settled either way by research, though somefascinating studies have been carried out. That our behavioural responses to