Speeding remains one of the leading contributors to death and injury on Australian roads, accounting for an estimated 30 per cent of all crashes.
New research led by James Cook University psychology lecturer Dr Chae Rose suggests that whether speeding is reduced by deterrence or self-control depends not only on drivers' own views about speeding, but on how those views interact with the environments they drive in.
Dr Rose led the study to apply Situational Action Theory (SAT) to illegal speeding behaviour, this is a leading criminological framework that explains behaviour as the product of the interaction between people and the situations they encounter.
"We applied SAT to speeding for the first time. SAT argues that behaviour emerges from the interaction between a person's morality and the situation they are in. Controls such as deterrence and self-control only become relevant under certain conditions," Dr Rose said.
The study surveyed 919 Queensland drivers and divided them into four groups based on their personal views about speeding and how often they perceived they were driving in settings where others commonly speed.
Drivers who believed speeding was wrong and usually drove in environments where others also obeyed the speed limit were the least likely to speed. For this group, neither enforcement nor self-control played a major role because their own moral views already aligned with the driving environment.
"These drivers didn't need cameras or willpower to stop them - their views already matched what they saw around them," Dr Rose said.
Among drivers who believed speeding was wrong but frequently drove in environments where others were speeding, self-control, rather than deterrence, was the strongest influence on behaviour.
"For these drivers, enforcement made little difference. What mattered most was their own ability to resist pressure from their surroundings," he said.
In contrast, for drivers who personally viewed speeding as acceptable but typically drove in settings where speeding was discouraged, deterrence, particularly the perceived likelihood of being caught, was the strongest influence on whether they sped.
A fourth group - drivers who both viewed speeding as acceptable and frequently drove where others sped - reported the highest levels of speeding overall. Deterrence showed some influence in this group but was not statistically significant, while self-control still appeared to matter, though Dr Rose cautioned this may reflect limitations in how it was measured.
Dr Rose said the findings reinforce SAT's core claim that the relative impact of deterrence and self-control is conditional on the moral configuration of person and place, rather than universally effective.
"What this means is that road safety strategies should focus not only on enforcement, but also on strengthening speeding-relevant morality in both drivers and the settings they drive in," he said.
Publication:
Rose, C., & Hardie, B. (2026). The Morality of Speeding and the Conditional Relevance of Controls. International Criminology.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43576-025-00202-3
