April 28, 2015 • 35 mins
Perhaps you've witnessed something you'd call "road rage" out there on Earth's highways. Perhaps you've even engaged in it yourself. But where does mere aggressive driving end and true violence begin? Where does the notion of "road rage" come from and to what extent does it match up with humanity's peculiar love of the automobile? Find out in this episode of the STBYM podcast.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and Julie Douglas. Julie, you
drive a car, right I do? Do you drive one
here today? I did? I drove one as well? Did you?
Did you cut anybody off? That's all over the place,
(00:26):
Hankins throwing up that middle finger. Um, you know, just
generally creating mayhem where I could. Yeah, I mean, it's
what you gotta do. I only ran two people off
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
(00:50):
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
(01:13):
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
(01:33):
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
(01:54):
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?
(02:16):
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,
(02:41):
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.
(03:02):
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
(03:25):
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
(03:46):
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
(04:07):
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
(04:29):
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
(04:50):
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,
(05:12):
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,
(05:35):
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
(05:55):
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
(06:16):
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
(06:37):
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
(06:57):
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
(07:18):
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
(07:40):
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
(08:01):
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
(08:22):
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,
(08:44):
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
(09:06):
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
(09:28):
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
(09:49):
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
(10:13):
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
(10:34):
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.
(10:57):
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
(11:18):
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
(11:38):
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
(12:01):
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.
(12:24):
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
(12:45):
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
(13:07):
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,
(13:28):
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
(13:50):
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
(14:12):
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.
(14:32):
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
(14:55):
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
(15:17):
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
(15:39):
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
(16:01):
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
(16:24):
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
(16:46):
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
(17:07):
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,
(17:28):
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
(17:51):
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
(18:14):
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,
(18:36):
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
(18:56):
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
(19:20):
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
(19:42):
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
(20:04):
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,
(20:24):
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
(20:47):
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
(21:08):
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
(21:30):
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.
(21:52):
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
(22:15):
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.
(22:38):
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
(23:00):
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
(23:23):
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
(23:45):
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,
(24:06):
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
(24:27):
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,
(24:48):
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
(25:11):
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
(25:33):
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
(25:56):
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.
(26:17):
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
(26:39):
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
(27:02):
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
(27:25):
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.
(27:47):
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
(28:08):
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
(28:31):
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
(28:51):
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.
(29:15):
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
(29:38):
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
(30:03):
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.
(30:28):
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
(30:48):
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
(31:11):
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,
(31:33):
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
(31:53):
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
(32:14):
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
(32:35):
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
(32:56):
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
(33:20):
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.
(33:42):
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
(34:04):
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
(34:24):
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,
(34:45):
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?
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(35:07):
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com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and Julie Douglas. Julie, you
drive a car, right I do? Do you drive one
here today? I did? I drove one as well? Did you?
Did you cut anybody off? That's all over the place,
(00:26):
Hankins throwing up that middle finger. Um, you know, just
generally creating mayhem where I could. Yeah, I mean, it's
what you gotta do. I only ran two people off
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
(00:50):
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
(01:13):
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
(01:33):
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
(01:54):
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?
(02:16):
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,
(02:41):
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.
(03:02):
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
(03:25):
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
(03:46):
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
(04:07):
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
(04:29):
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
(04:50):
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,
(05:12):
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,
(05:35):
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
(05:55):
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
(06:16):
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
(06:37):
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
(06:57):
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
(07:18):
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
(07:40):
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
(08:01):
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
(08:22):
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,
(08:44):
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
(09:06):
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
(09:28):
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
(09:49):
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
(10:13):
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
(10:34):
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.
(10:57):
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
(11:18):
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
(11:38):
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
(12:01):
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.
(12:24):
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
(12:45):
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
(13:07):
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,
(13:28):
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
(13:50):
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
(14:12):
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.
(14:32):
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
(14:55):
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
(15:17):
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
(15:39):
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
(16:01):
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
(16:24):
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
(16:46):
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
(17:07):
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,
(17:28):
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
(17:51):
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
(18:14):
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,
(18:36):
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
(18:56):
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
(19:20):
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
(19:42):
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
(20:04):
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,
(20:24):
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
(20:47):
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
(21:08):
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
(21:30):
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.
(21:52):
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
(22:15):
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.
(22:38):
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
(23:00):
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
(23:23):
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
(23:45):
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,
(24:06):
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
(24:27):
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,
(24:48):
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
(25:11):
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
(25:33):
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
(25:56):
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.
(26:17):
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
(26:39):
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
(27:02):
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
(27:25):
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.
(27:47):
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
(28:08):
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
(28:31):
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
(28:51):
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.
(29:15):
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
(29:38):
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
(30:03):
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.
(30:28):
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
(30:48):
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
(31:11):
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,
(31:33):
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
(31:53):
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
(32:14):
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
(32:35):
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
(32:56):
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
(33:20):
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.
(33:42):
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
(34:04):
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
(34:24):
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,
(34:45):
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?
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