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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.
"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,"
Measuring the degree of car territorialisation to predict road rage? Seems like a damn roundabout way of doing it, you might as well measure your car velocity by looking at the apparent motion of the stars.
I suspect analyzing drivers' I.Q would make a simpler, better job at predicting stupid road behaviour.
This problem's not hard,
And for societal win,
To irresponsible retard:
A safe, simple Schwinn
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Here in the UK you rarely see bumper stickers, yet road rage is not exactly rare. So I don't really see the correlation. Having said 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. But maybe that's just me.
Don't drive as if you own the road ... Drive as if you own the car.
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. I don't DO it - I don't really know how to key a car, never having done it before, and I can control my impulses.
Not everyone can control their impulses.
This is very helpful information. Now I'll know which vehicles my wife should keep the gun trained on.
Better known as 318230.
as a cyclist I lack opportunities for such displays of wit(I guess I could use my backpack), but if I did, it would have to read:
"The size of ones genitals is inversely proportional to the size of ones vehicle"
The best part is that SUV drivers would run out of fuel before they could even catch up!
Monstar L
...are the cause. People see "Vote George Bush 2004" and see red.
Now, that's why I don't put political bumper stickers on my car. Obama, Hillary, or McCain, I don't care. I don't need some nut-job running me down because he doesn't like my choice of candidate.
(Plus, it'll spoil the purdy paint.)
Camping on quad since 1996.
I'm not a psychologist, but I don't think I'd let a study done with that methodology through peer review. It's way too susceptible to confirmation bias on the part of the police. Traffic cameras would be much better.
who have a psychotic need to display their politics so aggressively
i'm talking about the people with 4-5 bumper stickers, all stridently ideological
of course you are entitled to be proud of your beliefs, but if you are radioactively evangelical about them, then i am 100% certain that your mind is completely closed and your brain dead hack partisanship is total
on the other hand, you can be assured no one will want to borrow or steal your car... although these bumper sticker hordes are usually stuck on a 15 year old rust eaten subcompact
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Ixthus fish and a Volvo badge: that combination is my number one worry when I'm out on a bike.
threadeds blog
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
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.
Are you insinuating that strawberries have low IQs? Perhaps they are simply too intelligent to deal with lower life-forms such as ours?
In those days, I was already fed up with the habit of Quayle and the rest of the Reagan Republican camp of vilifying people whose beliefs ran counter to their own by using the word "Liberal" as an epithet. I felt that Quayle was not qualified for to hold the second-highest or highest offices in in the land. I bought a bumper sticker and pasted it on the back of my car, as close to eye level as the car allowed:
I came out of a few hours shopping at a regional mall to find the bumper sticker peeled off my car, folded, accordion-style, and lying a few feet from the car. I was astonished at the attack on my free speech, and wondered at the fury behind it. I calmed down once I concluded that the vandal's action showed that my message had struck home. I replaced the bumper sticker, which stayed on, this time without vandalism.I dunno about that, but I do know that nearly 100% of hardened drug-crazed criminals started out by drinking milk at a young age.
I wonder if we could get them to do a study on slashdot rage...I think that I've noticed that people with sigs tend to fly off the handle more often than those without them.
has anyone noticed the connection between /. sigs and a likelihood of the poster to respond to trolls?
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Road rage is caused by me being unable to shoot you in the head for being such an asshole. Attention shitheads here are the things you should avoid:
Driving a white Buick 25mph under the speed limit.
Slowing down when I'm behind you and speeding up when I try to pass.
Being shorter than the dashboard.
Zoning out at a green light.
Goosing the throttle on your Harley you fat fuck.
A ricer wing bigger than Mexico.
Passing me on a one lane highway ramp.
Stopping, yes stopping at the end of a merge ramp on to the highway you redneck motherfucker.
Waiting for a half mile of no traffic in both directions to make a left turn.
Green light, asshole, it's not getting any greener.
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....
I shall not want.
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.
ever hear of the statement "wear your beliefs on your sleeve" or "wear your feelings on your sleeve"? example: you go to a party, and meet a stranger and ask how are they, and instead of a polite reply they tell you that their husband likes asian shemale pornography or their wife can't achieve orgasm except with her own hand
that doesn't really bother me, nor do the bumper stickers. the point isn't about my aversion to someone else's personal info, the point is someone who aggressively puts their personal issues and beliefs out there for all too see. people can handle this sort of thing, this isn't about strangers being exposed to personal beliefs being somehow damaged or discomforted
the issue are those who have the need to aggressively get their deeply personal beliefs and feelings out there in front of strangers. it belies large psychological blind spots. its healthy to not want random strangers to know deeply personal things about yourself. to invert that simple protection mechanism isn't about a surfeit of confidence, it is about a surfeit of lack of self-awareness
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
No we don't. How very dare you to even suggest such a thing. We comment because we can, not because we have sigs. If you don't like it, you can fuck off.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
When you're simultaneously in a private space (your home) and a public one (possibly the most public space ever).
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Try engaging your brain instead of your pinheaded hatred and bias.
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Use your head, can't you, use your head,
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because i'm already on double mandatory probation from the grammar nazis. the spelling masters want me under house arrest and the punctuation protectors and the capitalization czars are intent on having me executed
so stand in line, i'm not interested. my usage of the word is perfectly reasonable. feel free to petition the UN, or perhaps, swallow a shotgun
xoxoxoxox
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I am a relatively intelligent person.
I work in neurosurgical research, and live about 10 miles from my job, too far to use anything but a car, especially taking into consideration the route I'd need to take for a bike.
The most road rage I have ever experienced is flipping the bird at reckless drivers who almost caused an accident. And I think that happened twice in the ten years I have had a driver's license.
I am a very safe driver, overall. I do speed, but not at a level that *I* would consider excessive. I always use my turn signal. ALWAYS.
I have bumper stickers. Lots of them. I get bored sitting at red lights or in traffic, and I enjoy watching people be amused or horrified. I was once pulled over by a cop because he wanted to tell me he liked my stickers. I was once followed around the city until I found a parking spot because the driver behind me wanted to say he liked my stickers. I have also been spoken to in disappointed terms by more conservative types.
I have stickers saying things such as "I 3 MASTURBATING", and "THINK: it's not illegal yet" as well as "Auntie, Hate you. Hate Kansas. Taking the dog. Dorothy" and "I have animal magnetism. When i go outside, squirrels stick to my clothes." I think of them more as a gauge to see how uptight the people around me are.
My car is far too old to worry about the paint when I live in a state that pours salt and beach sand on the road three months a year. Let me tell you, the stickers are nothing in comparison to that.
Cars for me are utilitarian objects. I use them because I need to. And the stickers don't really interfere with that. Not even a little bit.
As a whole, I can see that many people might use stickers as a territorial thing. For me it's more to make people uncomfortable. Comfort encourages stagnation.
I, with all my bumper stickers, in all my pacifistic glory, would challenge you, who assumes there is a correlation between my sense of humor and my IQ, to a battle of wits any day.
I also have vanity plates. but they are relatively classy, compared to the rest of me.
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).
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
I was going to mod you up but felt it was better to chime in.
I never experience road rage until I moved to a big city (Washington, DC). Since then I have had at least two incidents where someone got pissed at me then followed, honked, and yelled at me for miles.
One was when I stopped in a yield lane making a right turn from one busy road to another. Traffic wasn't clear for me to merge, so I slowed and stopped until I could get in safely. The asshole in a huge, shiny SUV behind me didn't like me wasting his time. After I merged, he pulled up along side and yelled. I just looked over, decided he was an idiot, then looked back at the road and continued driving. He kept following me, tailgating and changing lanes to stay behind me, until I pulled into the entrance gate at work. Thank god for armed guards. The asshole fled.
The other time I don't know what I supposedly did wrong. My best guess is that he thought I ran a red light against him. But he had a flashing red and my road was only a flashing yellow. Anyway, he pulled up next to me, honking and yelling for a mile. I just acted casual and slowed down, refusing to pull alongside. Eventually I made a left turn when he was boxed in and couldn't follow me.
I can definitely see the desire to carry a gun. Just two problems: it's illegal in DC, and I might use it. It doesn't matter how safe and courteous you are. If you spend much time in a crowded city you'll encounter some some hyperactive self-important assholes on the road.
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.
Driving around town, I'm pretty relaxed, not in a hurry. But on an interstate road trip, I always encounter this BOZO. I set my cruise control for 65-70 mph crank up the stereo and soon enough I catch up to someone going about 5 mph slower and I pass them. For reasons I can only assume are "F#@%ing with me" The sphincter then speeds up and passes me back then parks his ass right in front of me again and slows down forcing me to brake! This may happen several times unless I speed past him at 80+ until he is out of sight. I am sure some of you may also have encountered these jerks. Makes you wish you had a rocket launcher in your grille.
If you read the actual procedure, what they did was drive up to a red light in the turning lane and then when the light turned green just sat there and timed how long it took the person behind them to honk. They then just attributed any difference in time to the driver being more aggresive and hence more prone to road rage. I find it hard to categorize honking at someone while stopped at a light as 'agressive driving', particularly when compared to someone who thinks they're entitled to deliberately block traffic for an experiment. Perhaps someone should study the 'territorialty mindset' of the scientists in the study.
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
I think the majority of fights and arguments I witnessed - or took part in, heh - in school were about someone taking someone else's seat or desk. Once someone has decided a certain piece of property is "theirs" they will go to absurd lengths to defend or claim it from others.
:)
Even as adults I often notice our territorial instincts in action in less obvious ways such as everyone taking the same seat in the conference room for a meeting as they all took the first time or using the same stall or sink in the public bathroom.
In Australia if you pay a LOT more than the usual road registration you get to put just about whatever you like on the plate. I find it bizzare that people with their names clearly marked on the back of the car do stupid things that will cost them a lot in fines if they get caught, but I suppose it's part of the territorial thing. It's a good rule of thumb here to give people in european cars with personalised plates a bit of extra space so their stupidity doesn't get you as well.
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whatever.