**1. Introduction**

Improving smarter transportations systems making journeys safer and faster with new mobility types shared cars and green mobility need new intervention methods which are affecting the behavior of drivers and mobility users along with the classical educational courses for offender drivers.

Of course the question of how to improve road safety, year after year, requires considering carefully the human factors that guide behaviors such as motivations, risk perception or culture. In fact, technological developments of cars and infrastructures, including road signs and pavement markings, have already reached a very high level. Moreover, some new developments are forecasted to be developed or even generalized: alcohol interlocks (that prevents drink driving), Intelligent Speed Assistance (that prevents speeding), and even autonomous cars (that prevent driving). Despite the considerable efforts of car engineers, and the crucial role of traffic laws to increase road safety with licensing and enforcement conditions, there will always be someone in the car that will have to make some decisions and inappropriate behaviors are often considered as contributing for a large part to accidents [1].

Traffic accidents currently represent one of the biggest health problems in the world. According to the World Health Organization [2], the number of road traffic deaths continues to rise steadily, reaching 1.35 million in 2016. There has also been more progress in reducing the number of road traffic deaths among middle- and high-income countries than low-income countries. There has been no reduction in the number of road traffic deaths in any low-income country since 2013. According to the World Health Organization [3], based on motorization in the developed world, traffic accidents are expected to become the fifth leading cause of death in the world by 2030.

There are numerous causes that can explain traffic accidents and their severity. These can range from external factors such as infrastructure (i.e. road maintenance or design), the weather or those related to the vehicle (i.e. age) to human factors. Our interest is focused on human factors, not so much in the physiological characteristics of the driver (i.e. age, gender, …), but as in the psychological processes that could explain their behavior.

An empirically verified fact is that the majority of traffic accidents occur as a result of risky behaviors that drivers assume, more or less, voluntarily. Drivers are not aware of the perception of risk, cognitive overload and the subjective perception of control that we believe we have. We wrongly estimate the probabilities of obtaining a desired result. On many occasions, we are unable to learn from failures since we attribute failures to external factors. Awareness of how this cognitive process works and involvement in driving could favor the modification of risk behaviors.

We start from the study of the driver's personality traits, specifically optimism and pessimism [4]. Scheier and Carver [5] have characterized optimism as a powerful predictor of behavior. Optimistic people can pursue risky goals, where the chances of success are minimal and have many factors against them; as long as they believe that in their case they can achieve what they want (i.e., perceived controllability) [6]. These drivers predict future events, and therefore anticipate what results they may obtain. They explain in a reasoned way about their intentional behavior and plan their behaviors to achieve the desired results [7–9]. Our interest starts from the study of a type of thoughts (i.e., prefactuals and counterfactuals) that reflect the intention of the person, based on the causal inferences that are established; and how these thoughts play a prominent role in decision-making.
