There is a tendency, when driving, to sit inside your 3000 pounds of metal, plastic, glass, and music, and forget that each of those other 3000-pound blobs out there is a person. You have a relationship, of sorts, with the people driving around you.
If you're going the speed limit on a 35-mph road, you are trusting the person coming toward you at a relative 70 mph to act in a very predictable way - with a lot at stake if you are wrong! Yet you don't even know him or her - or even whether it is a him or a her. Would you let a stranger serve you food, without even seeing what he or she looked like first? I'd say the risk is much higher driving on the same road with him, wouldn't you?
While sometimes we trust, at other times we feel so violated, so enraged, at others' behavior. I can't believe he cut me off! How dare he honk at me! Is it simply because we've been frightened by unpredictable and dangerous behavior? Sometimes. But I think another frequent reason is that, somehow, we feel victimized - not physically endangered, but emotionally attacked, taken advantage of. Cars can become a vehicle for expressing something ugly and primitive, that somehow feels OK to let out when we are insulated from the person of that person behind two layers of steel, plastic, glass, and music.
Our relationship with others on the road is really cut down to the basics - there is no language, no negotiation, just simple one-time encounters. And our emotions seem to mirror this simplicity, this primality. Without language to help mediate these relationships, are we stripped of some of our ability to reason, to modulate our responses?
Often, from the "perpetrator's" point of view, I think, pure selfishness and/or obliviousness to the needs of others is behind nasty driving. Why else sit in the right lane at a red light with no one else there and a car behind you with its turn signal on? It doesn't take much effort to change lanes as you come to a stop.
I guess what troubles me about my last observation is the implication for other social situations. I worry that the people who stay in the right lane, or who slow down, glide right, and then suddenly turn left with no signal, are the same ones who, walking behind you, see you drop $10 and pocket it, or take advantage of a very drunk freshman at a frat party.
If so, they are legion. What are the implications for the world? Have they always been there, only now they are more evident because driving puts us into contact with so many more people? Are they really not that bad, and the unique factors involved in automotive relationships bring out the worst? What do you all think?
Friday, October 17, 2008
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5 comments:
I believe it's more out of a sense of anonymity. Whether we're talking about a person in a car that we will very likely never see again, someone taking advantage of someone inebriated that will not remember the night or even anonymous postings on the interwebs where you aren't likely to be face-to-face with the other party, it's regarding something that we don't feel we can be held accountable.
An example was an experiment where people are given the choice of superpowers, to fly, be strong or be invisible. Very many people choose to be invisible. When probed, they would choose so to be able to do things that it would be difficult to hold them accountable.
I agree, Robert. But my observation / concern / question is, why, in that anonymity do people become selfish jerks? I didn't even get into road rage in the post, but that is kind of the paradigm of what I mean: when the felt restrictions of social observation are removed, people become selfish and petty.
I think there is kind of an interesting polarity between anonymity and a strange kind of intimacy, for some people anyway. Someone experiencing road rage is not feeling anonymous, but rather is very involved in an intense relationship with his or her target. It's kind of strange just how intense, given that it's someone he/she doesn't even know.
I'd suggest that the physical and psychological distance between people might even lead to a desire for more intense interaction, hence one source of road rage.
So a (mal)adaptive response to being disconnected with others is to act out in ways that reconnect us as individuals?
That's so depressing...
Well, road rage is one way in which that happens, and it certainly is maladaptive. I'm not positing that the reason for road rage is to connect with others, merely that the connection is there. What I was trying to say is that there is this kind of odd relationship with other drivers, and I wonder whether it reveals something about us as people.
I probably could have said, in a more positive vein, that I think it's great when people do things like letting others merge in or making room for someone to make a right on red. But unfortunately, what strikes me, for whatever it's worth, is the amount of selfishness, aggressiveness, and greed people reveal in this situation. My fear is that maybe it is a glimpse into what is really in the hearts of people I would otherwise have no relationship with.
I suppose that is depressing. My intent is not to be a bummer, but to articulate some of what I feel when I see people acting this way. I'd be really interested in learning a more positive way to see it.
It has no analogues?
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