Cognitive Abilities, Debt, Roads and their Impact on Deaths in Traffic in Brazil

Deaths in traffic represent a global and multicausal problem. We verified, through a linear regression model, that cognitive abilities (CA) and population indebtedness (PI) predict, together, 56% of the variation of death rates in the traffic (DT) of the twenty-seven states of Brazil. CA’s are related to a greater control of the attention and, possibly, to a greater compliance with norms for preventing traffic accidents, has a greater impact than PI on DT, since PI associates to only one deficit of people's attention resources. The decrease of PI and the improvement of CA can decrease DT.