Accident Proneness: Research in the Occurrence, Causation, and Prevention of Road Accidents deals with concept of accident proneness. The concept has had a checkered career, from the early British work whose high scientific standard has been universally acknowledged, through a period when the concept was extended beyond the sound basis which had been laid, to a period of reaction when doubt was thrown on the very existence of such a notion. The book examines in detail the arguments brought forward by the proponents of both sides, and, more importantly, studies in detail the facts and figures quoted in support. The book is organized into two sections: the first deals with the validity and usefulness of the concept of accident proneness; the second discusses new statistical techniques to evaluate the concept of accident proneness. The book demonstrates the existence of personality-related behavior patterns, which make people differentially prone to traffic accidents. This book is an important contribution to an important field. It is written in a style which should make it understandable (and even enjoyable) to more than the psychological experts to whom it is addressed in the first place.

Technology demands uniformity from human beings who encounter it. People encountering technology, however, differ from one another. Thinkers in the early twentieth century, observing the awful consequences of interactions between humans and machines—death by automobiles or dismemberment by factory machinery, for example—developed the idea of accident proneness: the tendency of a particular person to have more accidents than most people. In tracing this concept from its birth to its disappearance at the end of the twentieth century, Accident Prone offers a unique history of technology focused not on innovations but on their unintended consequences. Here, John C. Burnham shows that as the machine era progressed, the physical and economic impact of accidents coevolved with the rise of the insurance industry and trends in twentieth-century psychology. After World War I, psychologists determined that some people are more accident prone than others. This designation signaled a shift in social strategy toward minimizing accidents by diverting particular people away from dangerous environments. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, the idea of accident proneness gradually declined, and engineers developed new technologies to protect all people, thereby introducing a hidden, but radical, egalitarianism. Lying at the intersection of the history of technology, the history of medicine and psychology, and environmental history, Accident Prone is an ambitious intellectual analysis of the birth, growth, and decline of an idea that will interest anyone who wishes to understand how Western societies have grappled with the human costs of modern life.

Includes National Education Association National Commission on Safety Education reports "Critical Analysis of Driver Education Research," 1957 (p. 129-186) and "How Experienced Teachers Develop Good Traffic Citizens," 1958 (p. 187-251).