How to improve your road car-ma
Every week in the news we’re confronted with horrifying footage of road rage or dangerous behaviour captured on someone’s dash-cam. We’ve all been the person who gets cut off or tailgated. We’ve also been the driver who’s frustrated with how slow the traffic’s moving. It’s time to breathe, let it go and work on your car-ma.
Why are we so worked up?
The simple fact is, we don’t like to go slow. This, according to Research Fellow for the University of Adelaide’s Centre for Automotive Safety Research, Simon Raftery, could go a long way to explaining motorists’ bad behaviour.“Most people don’t drive for enjoyment, they drive to get somewhere,” he says. “And when you’re waiting for things to happen – for the traffic congestion to ease or for the driver in front of you to speed up – time can pass very slowly. At the end of the day you might have only lost a minute or 2 but at the time it feels quite significant, and that can build up frustration because there’s no release.”
How we respond to that can depend on 2 things, “traits and states”. States refer to how you’re feeling at the time, while traits, which relate to a person’s general predisposition, determine how you interpret threats.
Mr Raftery says research has shown people who generally respond with anger are more likely to interpret innocuous situations in a way that provokes a negative reaction, and by extension are more likely to behave dangerously. This isn’t the only theory that applies to drivers – in fact, there’s a lot of psychology that links back to how we behave on the road. There’s our natural instinct to put our own needs ahead of others, and the ‘just world’ theory, which makes someone’s natural sense of justice kick in when they see someone flouting a widely accepted social norm.
“The typical case is when there are roadworks: you always get a handful of people who shoot up the closing lane,” Mr Raftery says. “Normally it’s not okay to push in a line and the frustration other drivers feel may be an extension of that. Ironically, from a road management perspective, it’s actually faster and more efficient for people to use both lanes until the end, and then [merge like a zip].”