Authors: Tom Vanderbilt
Identity issues seem to trouble the driver alone. Have you ever noticed how passengers rarely seem to get as worked up about these events as you do? Or that they may, in the dreaded case of the “backseat driver,” even question your part in the dispute? This may be because the passenger has a more neutral view. They do not feel that their identity is bound up with the car. Studies that have examined the brain activity of drivers and passengers as they engaged in simulated driving have shown that different neural regions are activated in drivers and passengers. They are, in effect, different people. Studies have also shown that solo drivers drive more aggressively, as measured by such indices as speed and following distance. It is as if, lacking that human accompaniment—and thus any sense of shame—they give themselves over to the car.
Like many everyday travails, this whole situation is succinctly illustrated in a hit country song, Chely Wright’s “The Bumper of My S.U.V.” The song’s protagonist complains that a “lady in a minivan” has given her the finger because of a United States Marines Corps bumper sticker on her SUV. “Does she think she knows what I stand for / Or the things that I believe,” sings Wright, “just because the narrarator has a bumper sticker for the U.S. Marines on the aforementioned bumper of her S.U.V.?” The first issue here is the struggle over identity; the narrator is upset that her identity has been defined by someone else. But the narrator may be protesting too much: How
else
would we know the things that you stand for or believe if you did not have a bumper sticker on your SUV? And if you are resentful at having your identity pigeonholed, why put a pigeonholing sticker on your bumper in the first place?
In the absence of any other visible human traits, we do draw a lot of information from bumper stickers. This point was demonstrated by an experiment conducted in 1969 at California State College, a place marked by violent clashes between the Black Panther Party and the police. In the trial, fifteen subjects of varying appearance and type of car affixed a bright
BLACK PANTHER
sticker to their auto’s rear bumper. No one in the group had received traffic violations in the past year. After two weeks with the bumper sticker, the group had been given thirty-three citations. (The idea that people with distinguishing marks on their vehicle will be singled out for abuse or cause other disruptions of smooth traffic is just one of the problems with proposals to add scarlet letter–style designations to license plates; suggestions have ranged from identifying sex offenders in Ohio to marking the cars of the reckless drivers known as “hoons” in Australia.)
In being offended, the SUV driver has made several huge assumptions of her own. First, she has presumed that the finger had something to do with the bumper sticker, when in fact it could have been directed at a perceived act of aggressive driving on her part. Or could it have been the fact that this single driver was tooling around in a large SUV, inordinately harming the environment, putting pedestrians and drivers of cars at greater risk, and increasing the country’s dependence on foreign oil? Secondly, by invoking a “lady in a minivan,” later echoed by references to “private schools,” she is perpetuating a preemptive negative stereotype against minivans: that their drivers are somehow more elitist than the drivers of SUVs—which makes no sense as SUVs, on average, cost more than minivans. The narrator is guilty of the same thing she accuses the minivan driver of.
In traffic, first impressions are usually the only impressions. Unlike the bar in
Cheers,
traffic is a place where no one knows your name. Anonymity in traffic acts as a powerful drug, with several curious side effects. On the one hand, because we feel that no one is watching, or that no one we know will see us, the inside of the car itself becomes a useful place for self-expression. This may explain why surveys have shown that most people, given the choice, desire a
minimum
commute of at least twenty minutes. Drivers desire this solitary “me time”—to sing, to feel like a teenager again, to be temporarily free from the constricted roles of work and home. One study found that the car was a favored place for people to cry about something (“grieving while driving”). Then there’s the “nose-pick factor,” a term used by researchers who install cameras inside of cars to study drivers. They report that after only a short time, drivers will “forget the camera” and begin to do all sorts of things, including nasal probing.
The flip side of anonymity, as the classic situationist psychological studies of Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram have shown, is that it encourages aggression. In a well-known 1969 study, Zimbardo found that hooded subjects were willing to administer twice the level of electric shock to others than those not wearing hoods. Similarly, this is why hooded hostages are more likely to be killed than those without hoods, and why firing-squad victims are blindfolded or faced backward—not for their sake, but to make them look less human to the executioners. Take away human identity and human contact and we act inhuman. When the situation changes, we change.
This is not so different in traffic. Instead of a hood, we have the climate-controlled enclosure of the car. Why not cut that driver off? You do not know them and will likely never see them again. Why not speed through this neighborhood? You don’t live here. In one study, researchers planted a car at an intersection ahead of a series of various convertibles, and had the blocking car intentionally not move after the light changed to green. They then measured how quickly the driver behind the plant vehicle honked, how many times they honked, and how long each honk was. Drivers with the top down took longer to honk, honked fewer times, and honked for shorter durations than did the more anonymous drivers with the tops up. It could have been that the people who put their tops down were in a better mood to begin with, but the results suggest that anonymity increases aggressiveness.
Being in traffic is like being in an online chat room under a pseudonym. Freed from our own identity and surrounded by others known only by their “screen names” (in traffic, license plates), the chat room becomes a place where the normal constraints of life are left behind. Psychologists have called this the “online disinhibition effect.” As with being inside the car, we may feel that, cloaked in electronic anonymity, we can at last be ourselves. The playing field has been leveled, all are equal, and the individual swells with exaggerated self-importance. As long as we’re not doing anything illegal, all is fair game. This also means, unfortunately, that there is little incentive to engage in normal social pleasantries. And so the language is harsh, rude, and abbreviated. One faces no consequences for one’s speech: Chat room visitors aren’t speaking face-to-face, and do not even have to linger after making a negative comment. They can “flame” someone and sign off. Or give someone the finger and leave them behind a cloud of exhaust.
GEORGE
: This guy’s giving me the stare-ahead.
JERRY
: The stare-ahead. I hate that. I use it all the time.
GEORGE
: Look at me! I am man! I am you!
—
Seinfeld
The movie
Crash
opens with the voice of the narrator, a driver in Los Angeles, speaking over a scene of a collision. “In L.A., nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.” The statement is absurd, but not without truth. Sometimes, we do come across little moments of humanity in traffic, and the effect is powerful. A classic case you have no doubt experienced is when you are trying to change lanes. You catch someone’s eye, they let you in, and you wave back, flushed with human warmth. Now, why did that feel so special? Is it just because traffic life is usually so anonymous, or is something else going on?
Jay Phelan, an evolutionary biologist who works a few buildings over from Jack Katz at UCLA, often thinks about traffic as he pilots his motorcycle through Los Angeles. “We evolved in a world in which there were about a hundred people in the group you were in,” he says. “Every person you saw you had an ongoing relationship with.” Was that person good to you? Did they return the spear they borrowed last week? This way of getting along is called “reciprocal altruism.” You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours; we each do it because we think it will benefit us “down the road.” What happens in traffic, Phelan explains, is that even though we may be driving around Los Angeles with hundreds of thousands of anonymous others, in our ancient brains we are Fred Flintstones (albeit not driving with our feet), still inhabiting our little prehistoric village. “So when someone does something nice for you on the road, you’re processing it like, ‘Wow, I’ve got an ally now.’ The brain encodes it as the beginning of a long-term reciprocal relationship.”
When someone does something good or something bad, Phelan suggests, we keep score in our heads—even though the chances are infinitely small that we will ever see that person again. But our big brains, which are said to have evolved to help manage relatively large social networks, might be getting a powerful signal from that encounter. So we get angrier than we really should over minor traffic slights, or feel much better than we should after moments of politeness. “I feel like that happens a lot on the road,” says Phelan. “Somebody waves you over to get in the turn lane. I get these unjustified warm feelings about the world, that there’s kindness in it and everybody’s looking out for each other.” Or someone cuts you off, and the world is a dark, nasty place. In theory, neither should matter all that much, but we seem to react strongly either way.
These moments seem like traffic versions of the “ultimatum game,” an experiment used by social scientists that seems to reveal an inherent desire for reciprocal fairness in humans. In the game, one person is given a sum of money and an instruction to share it with another person as they see fit. If the second person accepts the offer, both keep their share; if he or she rejects it, neither gets anything. Researchers have found that people will routinely reject offers that are less than 50 percent, even though this means they walk away with nothing. The cost is less important than the sense of fairness, or perhaps the bad feeling of being on the “losing end.” (One study showed that people who did more rejecting had higher testosterone levels, which probably also explains why I tend to get more worked up about people who cut me off than my wife does.)
This sense of fairness might cause us to do things in traffic like aggressively tailgate someone who has done the same to us. We do this despite the costs to our own safety (we might crash, they might be homicidal) and the fact that we will never see the person we are punishing again. In small towns, it makes sense to be polite in traffic: You might actually see the person again. They might be related to you. They might learn not to do that to you again. But on the highway or in large cities, it is a puzzle why drivers try to help or hurt each other; those other drivers are not related to you (or even an immediate threat to your “kinship group”), and you are not likely to ever see those other drivers again. Have we been fooled into thinking our altruistic gesture might be returned, or are we just inherently nice? This traffic behavior is simply one part of the larger puzzle of why humans—who, unlike ants, are not all brothers and sisters working for the queen—get along (give or take your occasional war), something that scientists are still working to explain.
The Swiss economist Ernst Fehr and his colleagues have proposed a theory of “strong reciprocity,” which they define as “a willingness to sacrifice resources for rewarding fair and punishing unfair behavior
even if this is costly and provides neither present nor future material rewards for the reciprocator.
” This is, after all, what we are doing when we go out of our way to scold someone on the road. In experimental games that involve people donating money into a communal investment pot, the best outcome for all players is achieved when everyone pools their resources. But a single player can do best if they contribute nothing, skimming off everyone else’s profits instead. (This is like the person who drives to the front of a lengthy queue waiting to exit the highway and jumps in at the last minute.) Gradually, players stop contributing to the pool. Cooperation breaks down. When players in Fehr’s game are given an option to punish people for
not
investing, however, after a couple of rounds most people give everything they have. The willingness to punish seems to ensure cooperation.
So perhaps, as the economist Herbert Gintis suggests, certain forms of supposed “road rage” are good things. Honking at or even aggressively tailgating that person who cut you off, while not strictly in your best self-interest, is a positive for the species. “Strong reciprocators” send signals that may make would-be cheaters more likely to cooperate; in traffic, as with any evolutionary system, conforming to the rules boosts the “collective advantage” of the group, and thus helps the individual. Not doing anything raises the risk that the transgressor will harm the good-driving group. You were not thinking of the good of the species when you honked at a rude driver, you were merely angry, but your anger may have been altruistic all the same. (And, like a bird squawking to warn of an approaching predator, honking at a threatening driver does not consume much energy.) In other words: Honk if you love Darwin!
Whatever the evolutionary or cultural reasons for cooperation, the eyes are one of its most important mechanisms, and eye contact may be the most powerful human force we lose in traffic. It is, arguably, the reason why humans, normally a quite cooperative species in comparison with our closest primate relatives, can become so noncooperative on the road. Most of the time we are moving too fast—we begin to lose the ability to maintain eye contact around 20 miles per hour—or it is not safe to look. Maybe our view is obstructed. Often other drivers are wearing sunglasses, or their car may have tinted windows. (And do you really want to make eye contact with those drivers?) Sometimes we make eye contact through the rearview mirror, but it feels weak, not quite believable at first, as it is not “face-to-face.”