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The Psychology of Aggression on the Highway

From Florida, where this sort of thing seems to happen inordinately, comes a classic tale of armed “road rage”:

Two men arrested in what could have been a disastrous road-rage shootout on Interstate 95 Sunday offered an insight into the psychology of aggression on the highway when each sought police to report the other’s actions, experts said…

The fact that each sought to report the other points to the extreme perspectives that can appear in a road-rage confrontation, said Dominik Guess, a University of North Florida associate professor of social and cognitive psychology.

“We don’t see the world how it is; we see the world through our own eyes,” said Guess, who studies decision-making as part of his research. Neither of the men probably believed they were wrong, he said.

In the end, however, both were arrested.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Cars, Drivers, Traffic Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “The Psychology of Aggression on the Highway”

  1. Rich Wilson Says:
    February 9th, 2009 at 10:43 pm

    “discharging a firearm into an occupied vehicle, a misdemeanor”

    Shooting at someone is a misdemeanor? How isn’t that intended murder?

    *shakes head*

  2. John Campion Says:
    February 10th, 2009 at 6:03 am

    Rich, if it’s like other law, the answer is “because you’re in a car”.

    The last quoted section of the post reminded me of a saying (attributed to St. Francis De Sales, I think) “There never was an angry man who thought his anger unjust.”

  3. gpsman Says:
    November 23rd, 2011 at 7:29 am

    “We don’t see the world how it is; we see the world through our own eyes.”

    Change blindness. Inattentional blindness. Motion blindness.

    Ignorance of these factors seems to lead to all sorts of misery inflicted by motor vehicle.

    The 80% of self-assessed “better than average motorists” appear to have no idea just how easy “the eye” (brain) is to fool, and could not be less interested.

    Just as there is no crying in baseball, there is no emotion in “driving”.

    Emotions cloud the mind and constitute an additional unnecessary distraction for the “motorist” who does not realize that almost every motorist is always and forever a “distracted driver”.

    Motorists almost without exception are distracted from the driving task by their internal monologues and their ignorance of the necessity of taking and maintaining “conscious control of their attention spotlight”.

    If my anecdotal experience training truck drivers is any indicator, additional “training” has little or no effect because the vast majority of motorists believe they already know everything there is to know about driving (”I just need to learn to shift!”), and they taught it to themselves so no other authority has any qualifications to teach them anything.

    The vast majority of experienced truck drivers assigned to me for remedial training lost their jobs anyway (and knew they were perched on that fragile bubble) when the data downloaded from their trucks after training failed to show *any* improvement in their operational habits.

    Knowing what I know I find it especially distressing that gross negligence in the operation of motor vehicles is so commonly fallaciously excused as an “accident”.

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

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