"There is nothing inherently wrong with anger as an emotion, but nowhere is anger less helpful, more common, and potentially more dangerous than when we are behind the wheel of a car," wrote Psychology professors Stan Steindl and James Kirby of the University of Queensland.
I had a campus minister once say that road rage is the universal and common reminder that we are sinful, and debased human beings. Almost everyone gets angry and aggressive on the roads, especially driving through concentrated urban areas. And for those that claim they don't, well, the behavior of other drivers that do get aggressive, or aren't aggressive enough, is enough to make anyone furious. We all know that it's just as frustrating to be driving behind someone going 40 on the expressway as it is when you're cut off by someone with barely enough room to change lanes. I have seen everyone either yell an expletive or rolling down the windows and throwing up the cursed finger, from my parents to God-fearing men of faith.
No one is righteous in the world of road rage, perhaps only some drivers I wish I could meet. No one is immune from road rage disorder at 5 p.m. on a major freeway like I-85 or I-95.
Road rage is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as "uncontrolled anger that is usually provoked by another motorist's irritating act and is expressed in aggressive or violent behavior." And we didn't need cars to have road rage, as it seems to date back thousands of years: Oedipus Rex killed his biological father, Laius, and his aids, in a dispute over who had the right of way at a crossroads.
Many of us feel like we have road rage righteously, thinking that "I'm the best driver on the road. The problem is with everyone else around me." Almost every driver thinks he/she is better than other drivers on the road: drivers often have optimism bias, the belief that someone is less likely to experience negative events. Drivers also illustrated the illusion of control, which is the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events. The infamous statistic that 80% of drivers think they drive more safely than the average driver is an underestimate of the illusion of control: in a 1980 survey, 88% of Americans ranked themselves as above average in driving safety. Of course, that trend is statistically impossible.
It sounds preachy to say this, but all this leads to a deep sense of self-righteousness on the roads. Why can't all these drivers next to me actually drive? How did they actually pass the road test? Why is everyone putting my life in danger with their terrible driving?
Never mind the fact that most other drivers are probably thinking the same about us, but the result of this combination of phenomena is, according to Steindl and Kirby, "a perception of lower risk, a greater willingness to take risks, and cognitive effects that actually increase the risks."
Psychologically, road rage is also exacerbated by Hostile Attribution Bias, the belief that every accidental threat is personal, which leads people to over-react to accidents with aggression. At least I don't go that far, and my frustrations at other drivers are relatively silent. But road rage, as a term, has its origins in violence. Daryl Gates, then chief of the LA Police Department first called it "highway hostility" in 1987 after a series of shootings occurred on freeways in the city. Rick Bynum's three-year-old son was shot after going Bynum went 65 miles per hour in the fast lane. A frustrated tailgater swerved past his car and fired. By the end of the month of August, five were dead, and 11 more were injured from highway hostility.
The term "road rage" was coined by the newscasters of local LA station, KTLA, during this time. Since then, study after study has been done on road rage, and Reginald Smart and Robert Mann, two Canadian researchers studying addiction and mental health, found that the vast majority of perpetrators of road rage are young and male: 96.6% of road rage perpetrators were male, while the average age was 33.0 years. Naturally, I am a 22-year-old man, and a more aggressive than average driver, so I don't find it unusual that I fall into this category. Let it also be said, however, that the same study by Smart and Mann found that young males were the vast majority of victims, too. 6.8% of these cases resulted in death, which is a number far too high of a number.
But day-to-day occurrences of road rage, whether within ourselves or the people we ride with, don't go that far. None of the times I mouthed an expletive at someone's aggressive lane change was newsworthy, and if anything, for long periods of driving when I'm working as an Uber/Lyft driver, fighting fatigue, slight expressions of road rage give me jolts of energy to keep going.
Perhaps driving makes jerks of us because many situations we're in while operating motor vehicles aren't natural. The whole point of being in a car is because you want to get where you need to go faster. Being stuck in barely-moving traffic on a six-lane expressway (I'm looking at you, I-85), is not natural, and our natural inclination is to rebel against the state of affairs.
Also not natural is to drive long distances or periods of time with no social connection. Solo drivers have been found to drive much more aggressively, and I find this extremely true of my own driving. I am much more of a Jekyll driver with a passenger in the car, especially an Uber or Lyft passenger I'm trying to nonverbally solicit a tip from, but driving alone with nothing but terrible music on the radio to keep me company, the Hyde driver in me comes through with aggressive lane changes, speeding, and, oh, don't even get me started on my yellow-light habits.
Being in a car is the modern form of deindividuation, if being on the Internet is the postmodern form. Deindividuation is a psychological phenomenon where a person loses self-awareness and individual accountability, and why wouldn't drivers deindividuate no one knows their name, who they are, where they come from, or even what kind of day they're having? In journalist Tom Vanderbilt's book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, driving is the perfect formula for deindividuation because drivers are surrounded by others as apart of a group and also granted anonymity being caged in steel and glass shells.
Very few parts about driving and driving in traffic humanize us and other drivers.
So these are all the academic and intellectualized reasons behind why we feel road-rage, but what does that mean for how we stop or at least alleviate our anger in road-rage-inciting situations?
Steindl and Kirby urge us to "remember our common humanity" and remember that, well, all drivers are human beings doing the best we can. When we're in traffic, it's not like we alone are fighting through traffic, but a whole group of frustrated people just trying to get to work or get home are all in it together. And as humans, we make mistakes, and as drivers, those mistakes are just exacerbated in that they have more damaging implications to other drivers and passengers. But a mistake is a mistake because it's not intentional, so very few behaviors that incite our road rage tend to be intentional.
Road rage is a phenomenon that is natural and universal, and that means that everyone has it. And acknowledging that that rage is shared is, paradoxically, the pathway to empathy and understanding, and checking our road rage.
