Difference Between Road Rage and Normal Rage (and Why It Matters)
As calm as you are, driving tends to bring out the worst in us. It might be the personal armor of a steel crate on wheels, but road rage feels different than plain old rage. Let’s see why this is the case.
We’ve talked a lot about rage management in the past , but just like rage in video games , road rage is a special beast. Movement can cause hysterics in even the calmest of us. Unlike normal anger, you cannot walk away, pass out, or take a break to relieve stress. When you’re in the car, you just need to keep paying attention. In addition, there are all sorts of stresses that can lead to road rage. Maybe you’re just having a bad day . As you sit in the still traffic, you realize how much of your life slips away while you wait in line . Road rage triggers something completely different because it puts us in unusual situations.
We feel anonymous in cars
We know that anonymity makes antisocial behavior a little easier due to an effect called ” deindividualization .” In short, deindividualization is when a person loses a sense of individual identity. This can happen when you are anonymous or when you are part of a large enough group that it is difficult to identify you as a person. Traffic relieves both of these situations quite well, and it can lead to more aggressive behavior.
Being in a car certainly doesn’t make us anonymous, but we also don’t come face to face with another person. When we ride, we are surrounded by others in the group, but we are also enclosed in our own shell. In short, when we are in traffic, we feel less human. This series of studies conducted by the Foundation Traffic Safety AAA , measures the anonymity and the likelihood that the driver is signaled. Research has concluded that people are less likely to honk another driver if they are in a convertible where the warning signal can actually see them. This was further demonstrated in a study where a curtain covered the driver, similar to tinted windows. When people behind the driver, holding up the movement, could not see them, they honked faster than when they could. Basically, if you see the other driver as a real person and not as a piece of metal, you are less likely to sound the signal.
This anonymity can also mean that we drivers are more likely to do things that we usually don’t. Shorten someone? Of course, why not? They will never see you again. Hurry around the neighborhood? Of course you don’t live here.
We cannot communicate with other drivers
Another way that we feel less human is that we cannot communicate with each other. Of course, we can use multiple signals to try to communicate with other drivers, but this is a one-way communication line. This inability to speak upsets us more than you think. Writer Tom Vanderbilt explains how it works in his book Movement: Why We Move the Way We Do :
When we are in the car, we are mostly mute. Instead of complex vocabulary and subtle changes in facial expression, the language of movement is reduced – necessarily for reasons of safety and economy – to a number of basic signals, formal and informal, which convey only the simplest meanings … Even formal signals are sometimes vague: is it really the person who keeps driving with the right turn signal on, is about to turn, or has he forgotten that he is still blinking? Unfortunately, there is no way for the driver to ask what they mean. This can lead to a rhetorical outburst: “Are you going to address or not?” But you cannot ask, and there would be no way to get an answer …
When we are disconnected and unable to communicate, we get angry. When one driver cuts another, it is perceived as rude, but the offended driver cannot defend himself. We don’t even have anyone to complain to about the problem, because we are usually alone in our cars. So we get angry because we have no other choice. This leads to all sorts of behaviors that we would not normally do, such as keeping a close eye on that person and riding their tail, signaling them, accelerating to cut them off, or taking it out from the next person we see. Not to mention, we usually get annoyed and scream in the car.
The affect heuristic forces us to make hasty judgments based on emotions
The affect heuristic is a mental label in which we rely on emotions to tell us when something is good or bad. Basically, we have a first impression of a situation that we tend to stick to regardless of new data. We make hasty judgments and don’t think too much about them. We do this all the time, but as Wired points out , it potentially affects how we view traffic because first impressions are never updated.
When you see someone doing something stupid in traffic, your first reaction is usually to call them an idiot. If they cut you off, you don’t think why they cut you off. Maybe they were avoiding trash. Maybe there was an accident on the side of the road. Maybe you were just sitting in their blind spot. In other words, try to remind yourself that there is a person in the car and there are many reasons why they make the mistakes they do.
The affect heuristic keeps us from ever thinking about these possibilities, so we end up illogically frustrated. Basically, another reason we get angry on the road is because we don’t think about why other people do what they do, we only think about how what they do causes feel us.
When we follow rules, we hate when people break them.
Driving has rules, and the only reason most of us get where we’re going safely is because most of us follow those rules. Driving is a moral order, and when we see people breaking these rules, we get upset.
Speaking of which, BBC Future points to the anger generated by cyclists on the road, but their argument could be universal for anyone who breaks the road rules:
Deep within the human psyche, nurtured there because it helps us to coordinate with strangers and thus build the global society that is the hallmark of our species, rages on people who break the rules, who enjoy benefits without increasing costs. And cyclists generate this anger when they ride the roads, but don’t follow the same rules as cars.
We have all collectively agreed on a set of rules, and when people break those rules, we get angry. In this case, BBC Future is referring to cyclists passing through stop signs or ignoring traffic lights, but the same goes for drivers who do the same. Have you ever felt angry about someone jumping over the side of a highway to avoid a stopped traffic? This is the same. If we’re on the road and have to follow the rules, we want everyone else to be too.