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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'.
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
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.