Traffic (5 page)

Because eye contact is so absent in traffic, it can feel uncomfortable when it does happen. Have you ever been stopped at a light and “felt” someone in a neighboring car looking at you? It probably made you uneasy. The first reason for this is that it may violate the sense of privacy we feel in traffic. The second is that there is no purpose for it and no appropriate neutral reaction, a condition that can provoke a fight-or-flight response. So what did you do at the intersection when you saw someone looking at you? If you sped up, you were not alone. In one study, researchers had an accomplice drive up on a scooter next to cars waiting at a traffic signal and stare at the driver of a neighboring car. These drivers roared through the intersection faster than those who were not stared at. Another study had a pedestrian stare at a driver waiting at the light. The result was the same. This is why trying to make eyes at your neighboring driver is bound to fail, and it is the larger problem with in-car dating networks like Flirting in Traffic, which allow drivers to send messages (via an anonymous e-mail to a MySpace-style Web site) to people bearing a special sticker. Most people—except middle-aged guys in Ferraris—do not want to be stared at while driving.

When you need to do something like change lanes, however, eye contact is a key traffic signal. On television’s
Seinfeld,
Jerry Seinfeld was on to something when he advised George Costanza, who was waving his hand while trying to negotiate a difficult New York City merge, “I think we’re gonna need more than a hand. They have to see a human face.”

Many studies have confirmed this: Eye contact greatly increases the chances of gaining cooperation in various experimental games (it worked for
Seinfeld
’s George, by the way). Curiously, the eyes do not even need to be
real.
One study showed that the presence of cartoon eyes on a computer screen made people give more money to another unseen player than when the eyes were not present. In another study, researchers put photographs of eyes above an “honor system” coffee machine in a university break room. The next week, they replaced it with a photograph of flowers. This cycle was repeated for a number of weeks. Consistently, more people made donations on “eye” weeks. The very design of our eyes, which contain more visible sclera, or “white,” than those of any of our closest primate relatives, may have even evolved, it has been argued, to facilitate cooperation in humans. This greater proportion of white helps us “catch someone’s eye,” and we’re particularly sensitive to the direction of one’s gaze. Infants will eagerly follow your glance upward but are less likely to follow if you close your eyes and simply tilt your head up. The eyes, one might argue, help reveal what we would like; eye contact is also a tacit admission that we do not think we will be harmed or exploited if we disclose our intentions.

There are times when we do not want to signal our intentions. This is why some poker players wear sunglasses. It also helps explain another game: driving in Mexico City. The ferocity of Mexico City traffic is revealed by the
topes,
or speed bumps, that are scattered throughout the capital like the mysterious earthen mounds of an ancient civilization. Mexico City’s speed bumps may be the largest in the world, and in their sheer size they are bluntly effective at curbing the worst impulses of
chilango
(as the capital’s residents are known) motorists. Woe to the driver who hits one at anything but the most glacial creep. Older cars have been known to stall out at a bump’s crest and be turned into a roadside food stand.

Topes
are hardly the only traffic hazard in Mexico City. There are the
secuestros express,
or “express kidnappings,” in which, typically, a driver stopped at a light will be taken, at gunpoint, to an ATM and forced to withdraw cash. Often the would-be criminal is more nervous than the victim, says Mario González Román, a former security official with the U.S. embassy and himself a kidnapping victim. Calmness is essential. “Most of the people dead in carjackings are people that send the wrong signal to the criminal,” he explained while driving the streets of the capital in his 1976 Volkswagen Beetle (known as a
vocho
). “You have to facilitate the work of the criminal. If the car is all he wants, you are lucky.”

Express kidnappings, thankfully, are fairly rare in Mexico City. The more common bane of driving in the Distrito Federal is the endless number of intersections without traffic lights. Who will go, who will yield—it is an intricate social ballet with rough, vague guidelines. “There is no order, it’s whoever arrives first,” according to Agustín Barrios Gómez, an entrepreneur and sometime politico, as he drove in the Polanco neighborhood in his battered Nissan Tsuru, a car that seemed a bit beneath his station. “Mexican criminals are very car-conscious and watch-conscious,” he explained. “In Monterrey I wear a Rolex; here I wear a Swatch.” At each crossing, he slowed briefly to assess what the driver coming from the left or right might be doing. The problem was that cars often seemed to be arriving at the same time. In one of these instances, he barreled through, forcing a BMW to stop. “I did not make eye contact,” he said firmly, after clearing the intersection.

Eye contact is a critical factor at unmarked intersections in Mexico City. Look at another driver and he will know that you have seen him, and thus dart ahead of you.
Not
looking at a driver shifts the burden of responsibility to him (assuming he has actually seen you), which allows you to proceed first—if, that is, he truly believes you are not aware of him. There’s always the chance that both drivers are not actually looking. In the case of Barrios Gómez, the perceived social cost of stopping might have been greater for the BMW, higher as it is in the social hierarchy than an old Nissan Tsuru; then again, the BMW had more to lose in terms of sheer car value by not stopping. Drivers not wanting to cooperate, unwilling to begin that relationship of “reciprocal altruism,” simply do not look, or they pretend not to look—the dreaded “stare-ahead.” It is the same with the many beggars found at intersections in Mexico City. It is easier not to give if one does not make eye contact, which is why one sees, as in other cities, so many drivers looking rigidly ahead as they wait for the light.

Your daily drive may not seem to have much to do with the strategies of the Cold War, but every time two cars approach an unmarked intersection simultaneously, or four cars sidle up to a four-way stop at about the same time, a form of game theory is being applied. Game theory, as defined by the Nobel Prize–winning economist Thomas Schelling, is the process of strategic decision making that occurs when, as in a nuclear standoff or a stop-sign showdown, “two or more individuals have choices to make, preferences regarding the outcomes, and some knowledge of the choices available to each other and of each other’s preferences. The outcome depends on the choices that both of them make, or all of them if there are more than two.”

Traffic is filled with these daily moments of impromptu decision making and brinksmanship. As Schelling has argued, one of the most effective, albeit risky, strategies in game theory involves the use of an “asymmetry in communication.” One driver, like Barrios Gómez in Mexico City, makes himself “unavailable” to receive messages, and thus cannot be swayed from going first through the intersection. These sorts of tactics can be quite effective, if you feel like risking your neck to prove a bit of Cold War strategy. Pedestrians, for example, are told that making eye contact is essential to crossing the street at a marked crosswalk (the kind without traffic lights), but at least one study has shown that drivers were more likely to let pedestrians cross when they did
not
look at the oncoming car.

Drivers at intersections are acting from a complicated set of motives and assumptions that may or may not have anything to do with traffic law. In one study, researchers showed subjects a series of photographs of an intersection toward which two vehicles, equally distant from the intersection, were traveling. One had the legal right-of-way, and the other did not; the second driver also did not know if the first driver would take the right-of-way. Subjects were asked to imagine that they were one of the drivers and to predict who would “win” the right-of-way under a variety of conditions; whether they were making eye contact, whether they were a man or a woman, and whether they were driving a truck, a medium-sized car, or a small car. Eye contact mattered hugely. When it was made, most subjects thought the driver who had the legal right-of-way would claim it. Drivers were also more likely to yield when the approaching car was the same size. They were even more likely to yield when the driver was female—an artifact, the researchers suggested, of a belief that women drivers were less “experienced,” “competent,” or “rational.” Or was it just chivalry?

Traffic is thus a living laboratory of human interaction, a place thriving with subtle displays of implied power. When a light turns green at an intersection, for example, and the car ahead of another driver has not moved, there is some chance that a horn will be sounded. But
when
that horn will be sounded, for how
long
and how many
times
it will be sounded,
who
will be sounding the horn, and who the horn will be sounded
at
are not entirely random variables.

These honks follow observed patterns that may or may not fit your preexisting notions. We’ve already seen that drivers in convertibles with their tops down, less cloaked in anonymity, were less likely to honk than other drivers. For a similar reason, drivers in New York City, surrounded by millions of strangers, are likely to honk more, and sooner, than a driver in a small town in Idaho, where a car that has not moved might not be a random nuisance but the stalled vehicle of a friend. What the driver ahead is doing also matters. One study showed that when a car was purposely held as the light changed to green, drivers were more likely to honk—more often and for a longer time—if the nonmoving driver was quite obviously having a cell phone conversation than if they were not. (Men, it turned out, were more likely to honk than women, though women were just as likely to visibly express anger.)

All kinds of other factors—everything from gender to class to driving experience—also come into play. In another classic American study, replicated in Australia, the status of the car that did not move was the key determinant. When the “blocking car” was “high-status,” the following drivers were less likely to honk than when a cheaper, older car was doing the blocking. A study in Munich reversed the equation, keeping the car doing the blocking the same (a Volkswagen Jetta) and looking instead at who did the honking; if you guessed Mercedes drivers were faster to the horn than Trabant drivers, you guessed right. A similar study tried in Switzerland did not find this effect, which suggests that cultural differences, like the Swiss reserve and love of quiet, may have been at work. Another study found that when the driver of the blocking car was a woman, more drivers—
including
women—would honk than when it was a man. An experiment in Japan found that when the blocking drivers drove cars with mandatory “novice driver” stickers, the cars behind were more likely to honk than when they did not (perhaps the horn was just a driving “lesson”). A study across several European countries found that drivers were more likely to honk, and honk sooner, when the stalled driver ahead had an identity sticker indicating that they were from another country than when they were fellow nationals.

Men honk more than women (and men and women honk more
at
women), people in cities honk more than people in small towns, people are more reluctant to honk at drivers in “nice” cars—perhaps you already suspected these things. The point is that as we are moving around in traffic, we are all guided by a set of strategies and beliefs, many of which we may not even recognize as we act upon them. This is one of the themes guiding a fascinating series of experiments by Ian Walker, a psychologist at the University of Bath in England. In a complex system such as traffic, Walker says, where myriad people with a loose sense of the proper traffic code are constantly interacting, people construct “mental models” to help guide them. “They just develop their own idea of how it works,” Walker told me over lunch in the village of Salisbury. “And everyone’s got different ideas.”

Take the case of a car and a bicycle at an intersection. As it happens, studies consistently show intersections to be one of the most dangerous places for cyclists (not to mention cars) in traffic. Some of the reasons have to do with visibility and other perceptual problems; these will be addressed in Chapter 3. But even when drivers do see cyclists, things are not so simple. In one study, Walker showed “drivers” (i.e., qualified drivers in a lab) a photograph of a cyclist stopped at an intersection who was gazing toward the cross street but not making a turn signal with their arm. When drivers were asked to predict the cyclist’s next move, 55 percent said the cyclist was not going to turn, but 45 percent said the opposite. “This is what I mean about the informality of people’s mental models,” he said. “There are a lot of informal signals on the road that are being used. In that study you’ve actually got half the population taking it to mean one thing and half the population taking it to mean another thing—which is crying out for accidents.”

But there’s something even more interesting than mere misinterpretation going on here, Walker suggests. In another study, Walker presented subjects (again, qualified drivers in a lab) with photographs of a brightly clad bicyclist in a number of different traffic situations in a typical English village. Using a computer, the subjects were asked to “stop” or “go” depending on what they thought the cyclist was going to do at various intersections. Cyclists were shown making a proper turn signal with the arm, giving a glance or a look over the shoulder, or not signaling at all. Results were tallied on the number of “good outcomes” (when the driver made the right choice), “false alarms” (the driver stopped when they did not have to), and what Walker predicted would be collisions. As might be expected (or hoped), drivers tended to sound false alarms most often when a cyclist looked over their shoulder or gave no signal at all. As they did not know what the cyclist was going to do, they behaved over-cautiously. But when Walker studied the “collisions,” he found that these happened most often when the cyclist had given the most clear indication of all, an arm turning signal. What’s more, when drivers made the correct decision to stop, their reaction times were slowest when they were confronted with the arm signal.