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Road Rage Linked To Automobile Bumper Stickers
Ponca City, We Love You sends news of a study by Colorado State University psychologist William Szlemko that recorded whether people had added seat covers, bumper stickers, special paint jobs, stereos, or plastic dashboard toys to their cars. Szlemko found a link between road rage and the number of personalized items on or in people's vehicles. "The number of territory markers predicted road rage better than vehicle value, condition, or any of the things that we normally associate with aggressive driving,' says Szlemko. What's more, only the number of bumper stickers, and not their content, predicted road rage... Szlemko suggests that this territoriality may encourage road rage because drivers are simultaneously in a private space (their car) and a public one (the road). 'We think they are forgetting that the public road is not theirs, and are exhibiting territorial behavior that normally would only be acceptable in personal space,' the researcher says.
tasteless people behave in tasteless manner. still no cure for cancer though.
Don't drive as if you own the road ... Drive as if you own the car.
Bubelah, part of the point of the article is that this was a correlation they weren't expecting to find. That's what science is. You collect data based on a rough idea of where you should look and only when you've looked at the data do you start finalizing your conclusions on what you're looking at.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
The point was that if people are too challenged by the responsibility of getting behind the wheel, then we should keep ratcheting down their transportation options until we find a level where they can safely operate.
If a bicycle proves too great a burden, then let a man walk.
And if he can't walk without being a menace, let him sit in the corner.
I'm speaking in hyperbole, but the whole dependent mentality of no-one being accountable for crappy behavior is one of the more destructive threads in society.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Personally, I practice 'defensive driving', but that should not be interpreted as 'meek' - in a lot of situations, being assertive actually prevents other road users from entering a potentially dangerous situation.
I do still wish that cyclists were taught to ride as I was in the '70s - the roads would be much safer for all.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
Did they study the effects of drifting along and not passing while in the passing lane on a limited access highway (a 2 point ticket, called disrupting the flow of traffic, in most states)?
I mean, really, if you did these things on foot you'd get, "Um, excuse me" and "right behindja," and "sorry there, ah, commin through."
The real source of road rage is not being able to say, "excuse me." It frustrates humans because we need to be able to express ourselves. We're pack animals and the cars isolate us.
My hunch is that inconsiderate behavior is a better predictor than bumper stickers. I haven't done a study though. Could be wrong. (Ignore my sig it's a joke.)
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
That's right. The phrase 'linked to' in the title is a dead giveaway. Otherwise the submitter would have used 'caused by'.
Depepnding on your particular fish (I have seen them in bumper stickers before) maybe, but they most certainly count as "personalized items on or in people's vehicles" such as "seat covers, bumper stickers, special paint jobs, stereos, or plastic dashboard toys"
exhibiting territorial behavior ... acceptable in personal space
I'm sorry. Where did I miss this? I was raised to believe that rage is unacceptable anywhere... even in private.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
More often than not, it seems it's the tolerant, freedom loving liberal activists that vandalize and destroy other people's property.
Indeed. Nothing says "peace" and "harmony" and "can't we all just get along" like smashing the windows of a local retail shop during your anti-war rally, and burning giant puppet effigies to show what you'd really do to people you hate if you could get away with it. Yes, hate is tolerated and even encouraged, as long as it's in the name of warm, fuzzy, friendly political correctness anchored in leftist, populist platitudes. Why these idiots - so often theoretically college educated - can't see the fantastic irony of hating in the name of tolerance, and being randomly violent in the name of peace, I'll never know. Unless it's because, most of the time, they're just muddle-headed poseurs with no critical thinking skills and they're actually attending protests to get dates, shock their parents, and come up with something new for MySpace because people are getting tired of just looking at pictures of them being drunk at parties.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
It works for me - I never, ever have road rage (though I do swear at cyclists a lot).
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
has anyone noticed the connection between /. sigs and a likelihood of the poster to respond to trolls?
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
"Who modded this informative? Whoever it is must've been smokin' some of that martian pot!"
Bullshit. You obviously have all your "science" education from high school or some engineering college. Only certain fields in physics and chemistry rely on controlled experiments or even have the possibility to do them.
These researchers found a correlation, and made a further testable (falsifiable) hypothesis based on it. That's science. Only idiots who tag stories like this with correlationisnotcausation think science is causation studies. It's not.
I walk past a car at my work's parking lot that has Bush stickers all over it. I have fantasies about keying the holy living shit out of that car as I pass it.
Well, that about sums it up, doesn't it? Your actual desire, when someone else expresses their opinion, is to be violent. My desire, when I see a car loaded up with "random acts of beauty," "peace happens," and "war is not the answer" stickers is to actually talk to the platitude-dealing pollyanna involved and get a sense of how they think, for exmaple, that their random acts of beauty and kindness might change a local Taliban franchise's boss into someone who no longer likes to kill women showing up to work as a teacher and showing young girls how to read. How was "war not the answer" when Germany was rolling over Europe? How exactly was peace going to "happen" in the Balkans as Muslims were being ethnically "cleansed" from their villages with Serbian machine guns?
Unlike you, whose first instinct - however well reigned in for fear of being caught - is to vandalize the property of someone you hate, I'm more inclined to either roll my eyes, or actually communicate. I do appreciate your so nicely illustrating the shrill, tantrum-like thought process that drives so much of the politics on the left. It's entirely about rudderless emotions, drama, and cheap, sophomoric, fair-weather outrage that's anything but constructive... and shows that the pretense of disliking partisanship is completely disengenuous. It's true of you, and it's true of the current presidential candidate from the left. Hot air. It's not about getting anything done, it's entirely about how much you don't like someone else. "Change We Can Believe In" is the most empty bit of meaningless rhetoric I've ever heard, since it avoids, at all costs, any actual specificity lest the people that utter it get caught showing the real foundation of their idealogy. No need to of course, since the portrait you painted of how your brain works when exposed to nothing more than the name of a political opponent handily demonstrates the actual nature of most political thinking on the left: it's about actual hate, or about craven pandering to that hate as a way to power.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
those damn revolutionary traitors dumping all that tea just to make a point
I see, because the local coffee shop is an agent of foreign colonial tyrrany, being run in a country in which you have no representative democracy or constitional checks and balances. Yes, nothing has changed since the founding of our nation! We must still destroy the property and livelihoods of our neighbors in order to show how we must sever ties with the overseas monarchy that sets taxes on which we have no voice, stations troops in our homes, and prevents us from manufacturing goods on our own shores. Yes, I see now that you have a keen grasp on it.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
It's taught as the correct method to deal with them at driving schools, and I believe even tested for now.
Being tailgated is a dangerous situation - if you're forced to brake for any reason they will cause a nasty accident. The average tailgater is also a speeder, so even putting your foot down isn't going to shake them. Your only other choice is to slow down - not to force them to stop tailgating, but to improve your reaction time and lessen the chance you'll have to break suddenly and kill them.
OK....you know, I see this "correlation != causation" any time something comes up. These researchers did not say it was caused by it. They said it was linked. They said there was a correlation, not causation. What's the cause of road rage? Idiots who think they own the road. Guess what, these are the same people that tend to festoon their car with this crap, thus a correlation between crap on cars and road rage incidents. Insightful my ass....
Yes, it is: the correct method dealing with them is to encourage them to overtake you. Slowing down, keeping right (okay, left in the UK), etc.... What VoidCrow does after that is roadrage. He overtakes them, and gives them the taste of their behaviour. I doubt that such behaviour is encouraged in driving schools. In mine it wasn't: letting them pass, yes. Giving them a taste oof their own medicine is self-justice and a driving school advocating such things isn't doing you any good.
The same as driving a BMW, Mercedes or Porsche does. They drive those to tell others they are better than them, So are we required to hate those people too?
I seem to miss the group hate email every week. Are we hating everything we interpret as meaning "im better than you?" or is there a specific interpretation?
I know last month was hate all hybrid drivers and drivers who drove at or a tiny bit over the speed limit, and the month before that was hate stinky cab drivers, but I dont get who we need to hate this month.
And is hating SUV drivers still on or have we started pity for them?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well, that's ok then, because they never claimed causation. If you read even the summary, they don't say that bumper stickers cause accidents. In fact, the hypothesis is that a third factor ("territoriality") causes both.
;)
Basically that:
1. being territorial makes you mark your car. Sorta like dogs piss on trees and hydrants. Except smell markings don't work well with humans, so we use visible cues instead.
2. being territorial makes you act like the road is yours, or that everyone within X metres is in your personal space and should play by your rules. And when they don't, you might take it upon you to teach them a lesson or flex your muscles otherwise.
So they don't even seem to contradict your assessment much.
Look, I'll be the first to join in the "correlation != causation" chorus when it's warranted. But some people seen to have a knee jerk reaction to post it, even when nobody claimed causation in the first place.
Or was balking at "researchers" the whole purpose of that exercise?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
In my opinion you were both being reckless.
Granted what the other driver did was incredibly dangerous and he put the lives of you and your nephew in danger, however you were also being reckless in that you got out of your car to escalate the situation.
It is not your place to play traffic enforcer and by doing that you put yourself in further danger of getting into a fight with a potentially deranged and dangerous individual. Not to mention the fact that there was a kid in the car whom you were responsible for.
If there is one thing that I know from personal experience that there are CRAZY people on the roads everyday, some of them wouldn't think twice to shoot you dead where you stand just for yelling at them.
(though I do swear at cyclists a lot)
I am guessing that you do this because you feel that you own the road, and don't agree to sharing it with cyclists. Ill admit that you see cyclists doing stupid things sometimes, but nowhere near as stupid as car drivers, and a cyclist isn't likely to ram into you adn kill you.
...platitude-dealing pollyanna... change a local Taliban franchise's boss... Germany was rolling over Europe?When you're simultaneously in a private space (your home) and a public one (possibly the most public space ever).
My Journal
Ya, the cop was right. The other guy shouldn't have passed in a no passing zone, no doubt about that. You're angry, no problem there. But there is a problem with jumping out of your car and screaming at someone. In other words, the other driver's actions don't excuse yours.
I worry much more about someone that jumps out of a car than someone that cuts me off. The one that cuts me off will continue on his way; the one that jumps out may assalt me. He shouldn't have passed, but once he did perhaps you should have responded by slowing down to ensure the situtation didn't cause an accident. Based on your reaction though, I suspect you probably sped up, because of your holier than though attitude about the speed limit.
The speed limit probably was too low, because almost all roads in the US have limits that are lower than they should be.
You seem unaware of the terms "hard science" and "soft science", which were invented to disambiguate the two forms of science.
"Science" is a word without a single universally-agreed definition so your rant is a priori irrelevant.
The OP is perfectly valid in rejecting the soft sciences if his understanding of "science" is an attempt to empirically discover true facts about the universe, rather than an attempt to create random falsifiable hypotheses based on zero-sigma results and see which ones stick after 200 years.
Idiot.
I swear at cyclists too - not because I don't want to share the road with them, but because they're so God damned stupid. They run stop signs, run red lights, don't even LOOK before doing so. They ride on the wrong side of the street and generally act like utter assholes.
It's the cyclists who act as if they own the road, not the drivers. Oddly, it's only bicycles that act like this, motorcycle drivers are probably the most polite people out there.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
In other words: "Nevermind the facts! MY opinion is
Nuts to that.
whenever I see the Jesus fish on the back of a car, I do want to run it off the road on general principle
You know, It's very, very rare that a religious person (Chrustian, Jew, Hindu, whatever) tries to shove his beliefs down my throat. For instance, I don't believe I've ever had a Catholic berate me for using birth control, never had a Jew or Muslim tell me I was going to hell for eating a ham sandwich, never had a Bhuddist curse me for swatting a fly, in fact seldom do I ever hear religious people talk of religion at all.
What is it about you fanatical athiests, anyway? Kindly STFU, asshole. I'm not interested in your religious beliefs.
HAND.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Bearded Dragon
Corbett's correct: Sadly, it's better to just hit the other car [in the given situation] than to risk losing control trying to avoid contact. I was in a similar situation, and both the cop and insurance adjuster wistfully informed me that.
Try engaging your brain instead of your pinheaded hatred and bias.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
Unaware of the terms "hard science" and "soft science"; give me a break. I'm not 12. Also, the lack of a single universally agreed definition doesn't make anything a priori anything: you simply have to follow the ad-hoc definition I use, which in this case was clearly based on empirical fact. If it's unclear, you can always ask me to define my term, but the lack of a single universally agreed definition doesn't concern my statements at all. When throwing about logical terms, you should at least try to use them in a way that doesn't betray the fact that you don't know anything about logic.
And no, he's not "perfectly valid" in any way, as he's totally unaware of how the actual scientific process works, and delimits "science" as something that wouldn't even include the work of Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein (or at least, they would be deemed highly "irresponsible"). His definition of science doesn't encompass half of the so-called "hard" sciences, and very little of importance.
And "true facts"? Experimental methods and controlled experiments guarantee nothing in and of themselves. In fact, any controlled experiment begs a whole host of questions, beginning with: do you measure what you think you're measuring.
You mean let him hit you. He was the one driving on the wrong side of the road. To get back into the right lane he would have had to hit sumdumass's car. Not fun but probably the safest option for sumdum and his nephew. And afterward there would be dent marks on the driver's side of sumdum's car to show the police and insurance adjusters.
On a related note, I was once riding at about 30 to 35mph down a VERY steep hill. Single lane each way, with a gravel shoulder and a 4" to 6" drop-off from road to gravel. A car passed me (going about 40mph) and then proceeded to slam on its brakes and turn left right in front of me. It was a T intersection with no road area to the right for me to use. No chance I could get by on the paved road surface so I went onto the gravel at speed. Terrifying. Miraculously I didn't wipe out -- mountain bike + 40 years of bike riding experience + luck = live to ride another day. So, would this entitle one to some, er, rage? Personally I was just incredibly grateful to not be on the way to the hospital.
The point is that there are times when someone else endangers our life/lives, and it can make us a bit testy, even if they are sporting a "Have a nice day!" bumper sticker.
I come here for the love
I'm inclined to agree, especially since swerving off the road is generally not a good idea. What if there had been a pedestrian on the side of the road? The asshat probably would have driven off without a scratch, and you'd be left to explain to the police why you killed someone (though, in this case, the guy behind you probably would have corroborated your story).
cp /dev/zero ~/signature.txt
...I also have a severe problem with the definition of road rage too. A while back, I had my 4 year old nephew in the car and some jack ass thought that the speed limit (45, on a 2 lane residential area) was too slow and passed me on the double yellow line going around a curve. At the time I noticed him over taking me another car was coming around the corner and he shot back into my lane forcing me to slam on the brakes and run onto the shoulder in order to avoid an accident. Well, that cause me to fish tail a little but the car remained under control and no accident occurred.
Up the road, was an intersection with a 4 way stop. I jumped out of the car and proceeded to ask him what the hell was going on and we started arguing when I told him how to drive and where to pull he head from. A cop was sitting at the cross intersection and turn on his lights and all. He was saying I was having a problem with road rage when he was radioing in for backup. About that time, a car came up behind us and the driver walked up to talk to the cop. I was handcuffed and told to stand by my car. The car going to other direction thought I actually had an accident and turned around for fear of being hit with a leaving the scene of an accident. When he saw us talking to the cop, he gave them his side of events and the cop had me write a statement then let me go. I assume they cited the other guy. But I was going to be hit with some road rage charge for telling a person who almost killed me (and my nephew) to watch what the hell they were doing. Had that third car not turned around, I would have been screwed and another meaningless state for this meaningless result in this study.
Who modded this guy +5 Interesting?
Abortion is wrong. Just let it go nature way. If the fetus/baby dies, oh well. If it is in dangerous of the mother, then remove it and try to make it live.
See, I was born with many programs (Nager's Syndrome) and I am over 30. Sure, I have many problems but I am alive today! Who knows how long I will live.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I really, really hope so - your description shows that you made the wrong decision at every point.
You have right of way on the 'rotary' (I assume that's the same as a roundabout), so slowing down in anticipation of someone entering the system is wrong. The correct action is to either maintain your speed (good) or to accelerate (better, as it will put off the driver trying to enter the roundabout), being ready to brake at any time to avoid an accident.
Driving defensively isn't all about giving way no matter what - it's about making sure that accidents don't happen, and sometimes assertiveness is the correct path.
I actually am pretty unemotional as a driver - I swear because it's better to get the emotional surge over and done with, rather than bottling it up.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
If you really are an "extremely safe" and experienced cyclist, as you say in another post, then you should know just how terrifying and unsafe it is to interact with drivers who act the way you say you do. If you were an "extremely safe" driver you would not be acting unpredictably and creating situations where someone could be seriously injured, or worse.
You say you're not aggressive toward motorcycles, and give examples where they're moving faster than you. I think you'd find that most bicyclists were willing to similarly wave you past - if they weren't so threatened by your driving that they felt the need to take the whole lane as a precaution.
As for running stop signs in traffic without looking (grandparent): that's very risky behavior, and chances are they'll get injured at some point as a result. But you don't need to help things along.
The circumstances are few where you can intentionally do something that you know could cause serious injury or death to someone else without being guilty of a serious crime. Even when you plead something like self defense, you're no longer innocent until proven guilty -- you have the burden to prove (by a preponderance of the evidence, typically) that you actually and reasonably believed you were in danger and that your response was proportionate to the threat.
Anyone who sets out to cause injury on the basis of some sort of smartass legal theory is seriously taking his life into his hands.
(Obviously, I'm not your lawyer and this is not legal advice so much as a general observation about states' criminal law.)
This is not going to work out well for you when some other driver calls in that you are driving around pointing guns at people. Then you look like a grey-haired lunatic, and the courts don't look kindly on them.
paintball
1. Actually, as someone who had a lot of interest in physics, I don't see it as at odds with physics either. The history of physics and even chemistry is littered with observed phenomena or correlations, for which we had no good explanation after a while, or conversely for which we couldn't yet do a controlled experiment.
As an example of the former, black body radiation had been a problem since 1859. It's been almost half a century of failed attempts at explaining it, until Planck in despair gave up on the last hope of explaining it via the accepted physics (according to his own confession) and came up with the quantum theory. At first even he didn't think of it as more than a mathematical construct. As an example of the latter, well, it would be even more time afterwards until we could actually observe a single photon.
As an even better example of the latter, anything which involves astronomical distances or masses is still well beyond our possibilities to do a controlled experiment. We can't create a type I supernova in any lab, for example. We must rely on whatever happens to happen when we look up there, and some stuff took an awfully long time. Some still hasn't conclusively happened, so it's all based, you guessed, on correlations.
It happens in chemistry or medicine too. For example there was this observed correlation that low doses of quinine treat malaria, while high doses cause the same symptoms as malaria. (/That observation alone was what got homeopathy started. Later we learned what really happened there, but nevertheless it wouldn't have happened without that original observation that if you take quinine you get rid of malaria. We also got stuck with a bunch of pseudo-science quacks in the process, but I guess that's life.
So basically the idiots who tagged this "correlationisnotcausation", well, are just idiots and hadn't read even the whole summary before jumping in to polish their logo. It already spelled out that it's not the stickers that directly cause accidents. They don't really represent one side of science against another side.
2. That said, if I'm allowed to nitpick, I do think that the whole idea of science is to try to study causation and make falsifiable predictions. It's not just engineering college, it's the very idea of it all. And it applies equally to psychology, sociology, economics, whatever else. We don't just list some funny observed correlations for the sake of going "wow, that's amazing" and move on. We want to know why it happens, and how it can be predicted or influenced. That's the whole point of doing it.
Yes, we don't always immediately know what causes it. Sometimes we just have an observation and correlation, and smart people scratch their head, come up with hypotheses and test them. That's ok. Happens in physics too, as I was saying. But, nevertheless, the ultimate goal is to understand exactly what happens there, and why.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'd like to see a study covering the correlation of cell phone use while driving and road rage in other drivers.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny