Errors, lapses and violations

I've been meaning to look closer at this PhD thesis that was published last year by Sonja Forward, although I do not work directly with human factors as such.

Sonja Forward, Driving Violations: Investigating Forms of Irrational Rationality, Doctoral thesis, Uppsala University, 2008, Download

The thesis identifies that deliberate risk taking, violations, is one of the key causes of accidents in contrast to errors and lapses, i.e. non-deliberate behavior. This is of course interesting in order to understand how driver attitudes impact driving safety and potentially how these attitudes can be addressed. It is also interesting because it could potentially affect for example how driver monitoring systems are designed. Looking for inattentiveness might then not be enough since drivers that are fully aware of a situation cause accidents by deliberately violating rules.