Road Warriors

the road this morning. I'm limited myself, saving my my energy for the podcast, you know. But yeah, of course we're talking about road rage today and really other indignities of the road. Yeah, and there are no shortage of them all getting aside. I mean, any any given drive to work or to visit family, to run an air end. You know, we all encounter aggressive drivers, We encounter people who are maybe a little playing a littless attention to what's going on around them. There are no shortage of

annoyances out there on America's road. Yeah. And the other aspect of that is that cars give this this kind of autonomy, right that we've talked about this before. Sometimes it makes it seem as though just because we're encased in this metal box, were invisible to others. I e. We see a lot of picking of the noses. I saw that this morning, did vaping, right, That's I've seen done a couple of times. Or I I can see you with your with your vapories are there? Well, I

mean that could be legal vaping materials or not. But but I have not I have not seen that myself. Well. I wanted to throw out this statistic from John Cesana's writing Forwards Auto. He said that the number of vehicles in operation worldwide surpassed the one billion unit mark in

two thousand and ten for the first time ever. We also know that the volume of vehicles has increased by thirty five percent since n and yet the actual networks road networks to support those cars has increased by only one So more people on the roads, uh, more cars? What could go wrong? Yeah? What could possibly go wrong with the scenario with nice, level headed people driving there, gigantic killing machines down there down the highway in mass Well,

a little something called road rage. Um, it just happens to be one of the responses in a group of outbursts known as intermittent explosive disorder, which almost sounds like device, right yeah, um, And it's very similar to that because in with this kind of disorder you have repeated episodes of impulsive, aggressive, violent behavior or angry verbal outbursts in which you react really grossly out of proportion to the situation and at hand. So it's not just road rage.

You have examples of domestic abuse, um, throwing or breaking objects, essentially the sort of adult temper cantrum, but more in a disorder fashion, meaning there's some really very real conditions at play here when the person is engaging in this behavior.

And according to Randy and Laurie Sansone in their article road Rage, What's Driving It, which was published in the two thousand and ten July edition of the Journal Psychiatry, Quote road rage may be described as a constellation of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that occur in response to a perceived unjustified

provocation while driving. And road rage may also be defined as those driving behaviors that endanger or potentially endanger others and are accompanied by intentional acts of aggression toward others, negative emotions while driving, and risk taking. So road rage just those things that's been out there in the media for a long time, and not everybody has this very clear cut definition about what it is. But I thought the sense Owns did a great job of defining it

in that context. Yeah, it's it's easy to sort is you're driving and dealing with difficult drivers, it's easy to just sort of throw road rage out there as a as as an accusation against any perceived slight. Um. I think I've I've in my own experience, I think I've thought in terms of road rage when someone has just

been clearly driving angrily. Uh. But that's a rather different thing than say, the time a guy got out of his truck and a standstill and like walked up to my windshield and was it was gesturing at me like he wanted me to get out of a car and fight him or something. You know, did you no, no, no, But the interesting thing was like just kidding, like what

you didn't? Yeah, we we've got out our sabers. And when I know it was it was like a really crazy situation because he like stands in front my wind shot and I look up and of course I've just like wide eyed and appalled, I guess, and like that kind of took like that, that took him down like that, just the anger sort of washed out of his face and he walked back to his giant truck. There you go, little advice, inadvertent advice from you. Yeah, you don't fight

the road ranger, um, if at all possible. So road rage, yes, you're right, has become a catch all term, and we'll talk more specifically about that. But when we talk about this idea of road rage, or maybe road aggression is the better term, what are the conditions that are set forth? Well, obviously there's plenty of stuff out there on the road to ignite you. Right, you have old people that are

driving too slow, young people driving too fast. You've got cops lurking like sharks to prey upon our our school of metal fish as we go down the highway. That's what I always feel like. I feel like I'm an animal in a herd, or school fish in a school of fish. Yeah, shooting fish in a barrel. Right, Yeah, there's safety in the herd. But that shark is going to eat some of us. I just know it is.

Then you've got sudden stops installed due to traffic, wreck death, rubber necking pets, wild animals running across the road, the weather, solar issues, the sun shining in your eyes, goes on and on. But the classic example, the big one, right is the cut off. Somebody cuts you off, or you cut off somebody else, and then you it's like in a direct affront to some people, Right, you have invaded my space. You're trying to take me down a notch

in society. People get super mad about this. Uh people, I mean this, this is this is one of the scenarios more than any that seems to result in violence. Well, especially the cutting off, Like that's the number one infraction that people have a problem with. The honking. Yeah, we can all sort of deal with that, but if someone actually cuts you off, then they're getting into your personal space and that's risky behavior, right, They're involving you in

a potential accident. So what happens in the brain when this happens? When when when an individual does become enraged after being cut off, Well, first of all, stress hormone cortisol rushes through your blood stream, upping your blood pressure. Okay, Next, adrenaline kicks in to heighten your aggression. While the feel good serotonin drops and dopamine increases, so your emotional intelligence decreases in your body is now posed for flight or fight.

But of course you're in this metal vehicle. You're locked away this this individual will just pulled in front of you. Flying away fleeing is not really an option, so your body ends up going into war mode. Right And on top of that, we may be actually hardwired as humans to act more aggressively in crowds, which translates to that metal herd that we find ourselves locked inside. Off. Now, again, this isn't everybody. Not everybody's having this response to being

cut off or any other infraction out there on the road. Uh, but it may lead you to ask who's actually perpetrating all of this. According to a two thousand ten study road Rage, What's Driving It published in the journal Psychiatry, we're mostly looking at young males as the primary perpetrators here, but there are a number of additional variables that play into all of this. Okay, First of all, their environmental, non psychological factors. So you have to ask questions about

your potential road ranger. Are they driving an excessive number of miles per day? You know, is it their job to drive across country all the time? Are they driving busy roads? Are they driving crowded roads? Are they packing a firearm? Do they feel anonymous in their vehicle and therefore cut off from any kind of judgment or perceptions about what they're doing? Um? Is their aggressive environmental stimuli in the form of billboards or other sciences. That's another

factor that was mentioned here. And I can't help but think that music falls into this area as well. Uh, which, of course we're talking about the Flight of the Valkyries, right, the most dangerous song in the world. Yeah, just starting to science. Yeah, it just gets you revved up. You start thinking about flying valkyries and your love for for Wagner. But yeah, just another bit of environmental stimula that can

sort of tip the scales. Right On top of that, you also have psych i logical factors that contribute to a general tendency to displace anger and blame others. They also factored in unrewarding or stressful employment situations as well as just the overall stress of modern urban living. And then finally, you have bona fide psychiatric disorders to consider here, especially alcohol and drug addiction. Anxiety, depression, and anti social

personality disorder. Okay, so the statistical reality of this is very different from what the perception I think is. So let's delve into that a little bit. Again. This is from sense own study road rage, what's driving it. According to the findings of a Canadian telephone survey of more than people, thirty one seven percent reported shouting or cursing at another driver and two point one percent reported threatening to hurt someone or damage a vehicle. Now, again two

very different reactions. One is an imp I threatened, one is an actual threat. And then in another Canadian study of more than twenty adults, the twelvemonth prevalence rate for admittedly shouting at another driver was thirty two and then threatening another driver was one point seven percent, and attempting to damage or actually uh damage someone's vehicle was one point zero percent. So again you're seeing some of these

statistics begin to line up. And what I'm talking about here is the actual road rage behavior is hovering about two percent um. Another study that the Sinsons looked at was of dred adults, and they found out about one third of community drivers engaged in aggressive behavior toward another driver while on the road, but far fewer. Again we're talking about less than or at two percent actually reported serious threatening behavior or damage to another person or vehicle.

So what does this data tell us. It tells us that what most of us experience on the road is really road aggression or road anger. It's not true road rage where actual violence is involved, which again is hovering more at to just about two percent of the cases. And so this sort of boils down to semantics and this whole idea that we introduced earlier that it could

be a catch all phrase. So if someone's um flicking you off, that's mount road rage, but it could be characterized as such by someone to whom the middle finger was thrown at, right, yes, and it and it could also easily set somebody off to say, get out of their vehicle and stand by your car and challenge you to a fight for the other person who actually is

about to have an intermittent explosive moment there. So the reason I bring this up, the statistics or the reality of it, is because you would think anybody who is living in the nineties would think that road rage was happening all of the time, because this is what we saw in the media. Yeah, it was quite the media sensation. It was the new uh, the new just wonderful scare tactic headline, right, because of course, aggressive driving predates automobiles.

Even Britain's first speedway laws were enacted in the early nineteenth century, in fact, to stop horse drawn carriages from quote furious driving. You can be furious with just about anything. I gonna give humans credit, right. But the phrase itself road rage was actually coined in the late nineteen eighties by newscasters at kt L A in Los Angeles, following a series of very real freeway shootings. But it was before road raide really picked up steam as a headline

stealing scare story. And it has, i mean has all the elements, right, because it's this idea you're out there, you're you're packed in with all these strangers, and then somebody snaps, right, or somebody who just has its explosion

of anger with violent consequences. Yeah. And what's interesting about this is that you can go through a good analytics and you can do a search for road rage over the past twenty years, you know, past fifteen years, and get a good sense of how that that curve on the graph going up really corresponds well to the mid nineties when it was reaching it's apex right being reported, and then you kind of see now where it's not as much of a concern, and yet the idea of

road rage, that it's pervasive is still in our minds. Yeah, I mean it's it was almost a viral consistency to it. Uh. And and the people were on the media talking about, Oh, well, what's what's causing it. Some people were saying, Oh, it's political correctness, that's it's causing these explosions on the roadways, or it's it's Hollywood car chases, or it's mad Max. To the road Warrior specifically, that's making people drive like manias.

That though I've never heard of anyone throwing a grappling hook out of the vehicle in l A traffic, but but you think they would if they were inspired by

road wars uh. In article for The Atlantic titled road Rage Versus Reality um, and this is a key a key article that came out in the whole debate over over road rage, Michael of Fimento debunked handful of studies and polls they were really supporting the notion of road rage at the time, and he argued that road rage was just an excessively broad term that was applied to a variety of violent situations, and it was ultimately detrimental

because it also allowed us to ignore behaviors, actual behaviors, and actual situations that were causing accidents, such as one example that he brings up is people running red lights. That's a dangerous scenario that can result in and crashes and fatalities. But it's also a problem that has been successfully treated with with stoplight cameras in many areas. But that's not nearly as sensational a concept as you know, the be steel nature of of the human rising up

in your little car out there on the highway. It does. It doesn't sell papers, No, it doesn't write the human barbarian and tattered clothing speeding towards you. The reality of it is that when road rage does happen, or even aggressive driving, when it does happen, it happens in some really like boring grid lack traffic scenarios when someone has been marinating and say like a two hour long traffic

gridlock situation, that's when you see tempers flare. Yeah, and I do want to mention, there's not a single traffic jam scene in Road Warior. It's all it's all constant motion. There's no bumper to bupper traffic in that film. Yeah, because if it, if it were, that would be an entirely different movie, right, but the sort of post apocalyptic circumstances would not have occurred. Yeah. I would like to see a post apocalyptic traffic jam film. That would be good.

All right, someone's working on it. All right. We're going to talk about the territorial markings that we make with our cars and what we do to our cars and what that says about us when we have, say a bumper sticker. Indeed, you do see a bupper sticker scenario

out on the road. Is rather interesting because you see that the cars without completely just completely devoid of stickers, and you have the ones with a sprinkling and then they're the ones where every political or social or music related interest that I have will be represented on the rear of my vehicle. Yeah, And I just want to

mention this. In passing, one of the strangest personalized license plates I've ever seen was on like r X seven, you know, kind of a sporty car driven by a guy, and it said whacking it, whacking it, whack it like like whackamobile. I will leave the interpretation up to you guys. Maybe he was the inventor of whackamole and that's how he made his fortune and purchase that automobile. Maybe, but the fact that he had a personalized license plate tells

us a little bit something about him. And the reason we know this is because we were looking at a two thousand and eight Colorado State University study by social psychologist William Salimco, who wanted to see if drivers of cars with these kind of ornament right bumper stickers, window decals, personalized license plates, and other sort of territorial markers, if they not only get mad when someone cuts in their lane or is slow to respond to a change traffic light,

if these people are more likely than those who do not personalize their cars to use their vehicles to express aggressive driving behavior. So again, aggressive driving behavior could be tailgating, honking, you know, just the other random stuff, you know, flicking

someone off. So participants were asked to describe the value and condition of their cars, as well as whether they had personalized them in any way, and the researchers would record, you know, if they had seat covers, bumper stickers, special special paint jobs, stereos, or even plastic dashboard toys, and then they asked them a bunch of questions about their driving and so to keep the participants from realizing what the team was getting it, they put in some you know,

fake questions like hey, what kind of music do you listen to in the car, along with questions like if someone is driving slow in the fast lane, how angry does this make you? And they used a pre existing scale called use a vehicle to express anger to ferret out those participants who might use aggression while driving. So, of course, people who had a larger number of personalized items on or in their car were six more likely to engage in anger fueled road behavior. That's not huge,

but that's significant. And so the other finding they had is that when it came to bumper stickers, it didn't matter if you had bumper sticker that said coexist or world peace, or if you had I love guns. You know it did the sentiment didn't matter. Just the fact that you personalize your car mattered. Now it sounds like the study came before putting testicles on your truck became a thing. So I guess we we sadly don't see that represented in the data, although that would be in

that that would be under the umbrella of personalizing the car. Right, So if you decide to hang a pair of metal testicles on your car, you possibly could be in this category of a higher degree of aggressive car behavior. So the question then becomes why, why if you personalize your car, why might you have drift more aggressively. Well, the idea is that people carry around three kinds of territorial spaces in their heads. One is personal territory like home or

your bedroom. The second involved space that's temporarily yours, say, like an office cubicle or a gym locker, and then the third is a kind of public territory, so park benches, walking trails, and of course roads. So the idea is that you the more you personalize your car, the more it's becoming this sort of territory that you're wielding in

these different spaces. Okay, yeah, and you can see that sort of transform onto on the road into a situation of like, my space is this position on the road that with a certain maintained space between vehicles a certain maintained speed that I get to to keep on the road, and if you infringe on any of those, you're infringing on this space exactly. And of course it doesn't mean that if you have a bumper sticker or something or

dashboard that you're driving around recklessly. It's just this one study just tells us a little bit of a statistic here, sixteen percent more likely to engage in anger fueled antics. Now, of course, another area in which we invest ourselves personally in our in our automobiles and can get rather possessive comes to parking spaces. And we've all encountered this, right. What you're you're you're dropping by the by the grocery store to pick up some things, right or uh, you

know coming in and out of work. Uh, the parking lot is busy. Uh. You go in, you get what you need to do, you come out, you're going to leave. You're pulling out of your parking place and there's somebody waiting on the parking place already, and this weird territorial nature kicks in and it doesn't make any sense, right because you're done with this place, You're about to go home or go on to the next point on your timeline.

But instead, what do you do? You maybe linger a little bit, maybe you you make some some evil eyes at the person that's waiting or even hawking for you to move. Well. Study actually looked into this titled Territorial defense in Parking Lots Retaliation against waiting Drivers, and they were just how possessive we get about those parking places, demonstrating that drivers are territorial even when it runs completely contrary to the goal of leaving the flipping parking lot.

So they conducted three studies here. In the first one that they observed two hundred departing cars, and they found that intruded upon draw rivers took longer to leave a space than non intruded upon drivers. So again, somebody's making a visual sign of waiting and being a little grumpy about you taking your time versus somebody that you don't

even notice. Right. Study to involved two forty drivers with a manipulated level of intrusion and status of intruding car, meaning is it a clunker that's waiting on you to leave or is it, you know, somebody in a fancy sports car. And they found that drivers took longer to leave when another car was present and when the intruder hanked. So the hank is the kiss of death if you really want them to give up that that that's parking space.

In short order, they also found that males left significantly sooner when intruded upon by a higher rather than a lower status car, but females departure time didn't differ as a function of the status of the car. So to the males it mattered, Oh, this is a big important sports car waiting on me. I had better move, But the females in this study didn't care. And finally, they simply pulled individuals at them all uh and asked what would they do if if they were pulling out and

somebody honked at them? And they found in the vast majority of them said that they would take longer to leave if the driver of the car halked. I have to say, the honking is sort of terrible, and um, I've done it before. I had to ask myself, like, have I kind of uh waited around in my parking space before pulling out because someone was really impatient and

did that? And yes, because I think of myself as an efficient egressor and enter of the car, and and that this is something that I'm not usually, you know, hanging out in my car and doing stuff. So it feels,

you know, when someone does that, like terribly impatient. And I remember once that I got in my car and just sort of unwrapped a piece of Wriggley's gum for a very long time before putting the car and reverts because you do, it's like you're trying to exact some sort of punishment or just just this is still my space. This space is still mine for as long as I want it, and you will wait your turn, Honker. It's right, ten more seconds of luxuriously unwrapping this gum, you know.

And we have a weird relationship with the hank in in America, it seems because you go to other places, uh specifically I'm guess I'm thinking of of of Mexico and some parts of Latin America, where like the hank is a signal to say, hey, I am here, or it's or it's it more about just this letting other drivers know that you were present or that some sort of accident situation might happen. But in the in the States, it seems like to blow the horn is to say

you were out of line and possibly potentially killing people. Well, I think it's the duration of the signal. So if it's a quick beat, you know, or a quick honk, it's kind of like, hey, come on, what I'm here to lay on? The horn is the problem. And this reminds me too of the politeness episode that we just did, and we were talking about communication and in directness and how in Russia, the more direct the better, and how people don't lose face, you know, because they don't have

a problem with that sort of negative feedback. But perhaps here in the United States were a little bit more sensitive to that, to the honk, And that may be because we see the car as an extension of ourselves. We've already put out this idea that it could be a sort of territory for us, the third home for us, for a second home of sorts um. But there's this

idea that it could actually like physically embody us. And that is not a new concept that we have introduced on this podcast before, because we talked about tool use and how humans we we fold our hands around a tool and all of a sudden becomes part of us, and we have body schema. We have a map in our mind of where we are in space and time,

and we incorporate these objects. And we've even talked about how the mind will sometimes adopt a fake limb in the right context, of course, usually an experiment as our own, if prompted right. So we've got that sort of pro pre aceptive drift to other objects in people um when the context warrants it. So it's not so weird to think that you could do the same thing with your car. Now.

There's a two thousand eleven Temple University paper by A. Yalia Rubio who found that two studies on driving in relationship to car bore out this idea that a car could be an extension of yourself and as a result,

you could have stronger aggressive driving tendencies. So Rubio and a colleague used a hundred and thirty four surveys of men and women in Israel averaging UH twenty three point five years of age to examine the influence of personality, attitudes and values on driving, and the researchers also looked at the factors of risk, attraction, impulsivity, and driving. I love this as a hedonistic activity as well as perceptions

about time pressures. And they did this with another two people too, so they had a sort of part B of this study that involved some of the people from the first study, and they saw an uptick in disregard for road rules, aggressive behavior, and the sense that these

people were under more pressure in terms of time. So it's worth noting that this study is dealing with an age group that is younger, and as a result, Rubio and her colleagues posit that some of this has to do this attachment to car and extension of cell through car, with the fact that people haven't really developed their personalities fully yet, and so part of this car is informing who they think they are and the sort of maybe the bleeding edges of themselves out there in a public space.

And this is where we see things like the red car situation, right, well, more like this sports cars are you're thinking like the red sports car and like, yeah, hey I'm here, I'm going to tear it up on the streets. Yeah, that sort of any McQueen persona if you've seen cars, Okay, that's right, I have not seen it, but I know of what do you speak? It's a kid favorite, um, But so yeah, there's this idea that that part of your personality is being performed by the car.

But then of course you have the risk taking. And anybody who worked for an insurance company knows what I'm talking about, or anybody who has someone on their policy who's under the age of twenty five knows what I'm talking about. You're going to get charged more for youth when youth is driving, because youth doesn't have the fully forward, prefunct frontal cortex that we've talked about before, specifically when we've talked about the teenage brain. Yeah, they're gonna take

more risks, more risk to fit in. It's to the teenage brain. It's vital to find a place in some sort of social scenario so that they can survive. Right in the pre ful to cortex and in the executive function of hey, is this a good idea? Maybe not be as fully engaged at that age as you would want it to be. And of course, in America, those teenagers grow up into uh, into a culture that has

historically loved its automobiles. I mean, the automobile industry has I mean continues to be a symbol of of American ingenuity. UH and UH an accomplishment and freedom. Yeah, I mean it's as well as other vehicles such as the motorcycle. Right, the freedom to be out there and own the road. But our times a change in uh, they might be.

According to a Pew Research Center of study from two thousand ten published as Americans in their Cars is the Romance on the skids and uh, they looked at the trends in terms of loving your car versus just seeing your cars this thing you have to be and to go from point A to point B. They found in two thousand ten that six of American drivers said that they like to drive they genuinely liked it, and that was down from sevent and just twenty percent said that

they considered the car something special compared to forty in ninety one. Now, the Pew survey identified a number of different factors that were contributing to these trends, and you might think that gasoline might be a big one, but gas actually only came in at three percent. Three percent of people saying that gas gasolene prices factored in to their uh, they're they're they're falling out of love with cars. Um. The big one was traffic congestion of those surveyed. Another

big factor other drivers fourteen percent. So already we see what thirty seven percent tied to traffic congestion and having to put up with other people in the cars that make up that congestion. Commuting as another ten percent on on top of that, and then running errands also contributed ten percent um And again this is all this is all pointing back to that idea that was just more and more cars out there, more people driving on these these these roads, that that just can't keep up with

the increase in population. A National Household Travel survey in two thousand and one found that at that point, for the first time since the studies have been conducted, there were more personal vehicles on the road two d and four million than licensed licensed drivers million in the country. It's still noted that that in that Pew survey of Americans. I mean, that's that's still two third margin of Americans who love driving. And we still do a lot. We

still spend a lot of time in our car. We're singing there, we listen to music, we listen to podcasts, we talk on the phone, we read, we groom, we sleep. Uh, but we do seem to do a lot of things that are about making do with our time in the car or even sort of transcending that time we have

to spend in the car versus just really loving the road. Yeah, And I think you're touching on something here with technology becoming so much more a part of our lives and informing our lives, that we begin to look for these bits of all in time right where we can listen to a podcast or listen to music, or access one million other things that we can via the Internet. And so this idea that Tesla co founder and CEO Elon

Musk has is really interesting. He thinks that computers will do a much better job than us when it comes to driving, to the point where statistically humans would be a liability on the roadways and would be banned from driving in the future sometime. Yeah. I mean he makes the comparison to elevators. Right in the old days, you got an elevator, there's an elevator operator to make this piece of machinery go up and down. But it got to the point where we didn't need the operator anymore.

The technology was such that the elevators took care of above everything, and if you had an operator, it would hinder the process, right, And so you've got these two different things going on. You have computers rising to the occasion to to do this in a way that it um manageable, right, not cost effective now, but perhaps in

the future. And then you have us consuming so much media and trying to find spare moments in our lives that we're pretty open to trying out something like this if it means that on our commute we could read a book on um a device as opposed to sit there in you know, knuckle whitening traffic, trying not to yell at someone or get angry about something. And ultimately computers would be able to just manage the flow of

traffic more efficiently. In this scenario, you wouldn't have to worry about all the little things like rubber necking and tailgating. Everything could be could There could be a standard distance between cars, the standard speed could be maintained, and yeah, to your point, you could just lean back, read a book and not worry about all those little things on

the road. Yeah, sounds lovely. And according to the Boston Consulting Group, fully automated automated driver less cars could make up nearly ten percent of global vehicle sales or about twelve million cars a year by the year twenty five, So it's something that could happen, you know, over the next couple of decades. Here. Yeah, we've been developing the technology for some time, so it's really not a matter

of if, but but when. Yeah, and and also a matter of like, well, how are we going tomok that up? As humans? You know, like how are we going to express our status in these driver list cars? Or maybe even just having a driver list car at that point becomes a status object. And what will whacken it? Think of it? Right? Will he appreciate having uh this free time in the vehicle or is he going to miss the command of his vehicle on the open road? And

what will he be doing in his vehicle? We don't know, there's no way to know alright, Today you have a road rage aggressive driving um, something I think we can all relate to on one level or another. If you want to check out more topics related to human behavior alemobiles? What have you gone? Over to? Stuff to blow your mind? Dot com that's the mother ship. That's where we'll find all the podcast episodes, videos, blog posts, splinks out to social media accounts, you name it, and you have ideas

about this. You want to share your the traffic infraction that drives you the most crazy way. You can do that by sending us an email at below the mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com