Take the off-ramp from road rage
With jam-packed holiday traffic in the forecast, a Carolina social psychologist describes where road rage begins and offers ways to avoid it.
Holiday traffic. It’s a mix of clogged highways and people trying to get places fast, sometimes in aggressive ways fueled by road rage or that cause road rage in others.
In North Carolina, more vehicle crashes occur in November than any other month.
Combine stressed-out people and increased traffic, and it’s a holiday recipe to avoid.
Kurt Gray, an associate professor in Carolina’s psychology and neuroscience department in the College of Arts & Sciences, studies perceptions of others’ actions and moral psychology. He has some insights into driver behavior and offers advice to avoid feeling angry on the road.
Traffic has become increasingly dangerous, according to North Carolina Department of Transportation reports. Total crashes, deaths and injuries in North Carolina steadily rose each year since 2014, when 226,552 crashes killed 1,369 people and injured 80,277 others to 2019’s totals of 285,074 crashes with 1,470 fatalities and 125,232 people injured.
Around Thanksgiving, crashes increased annually to 2019’s totals of 3,076 crashes, 1,304 injuries and 19 deaths. November was each year’s peak month for crashes with an average of 25,625 between 2014 and 2018.
(Chart by Leighann Vinesett/UNC-Chapel Hill)
Top accident causes in 2019 included following too closely and reckless or aggressive driving, which sounds a lot like the American Psychological Association’s definition of road rage as “aggressive or confrontational behavior while driving, typically triggered by an actual or imagined transgression by another driver.”
Lose your super-sensitivity
Where do feelings of even low-level annoyance come from? Gray said that humans are finely tuned to injustice around them because by being sensitive to it, we can more likely avoid future injustices. “If someone affronts you and you detect it and say, ‘Don’t do that,’ you challenge them,” Gray said. “Whether it’s at home or in the workplace, that’s useful because they’re less likely to do it to you next time, but it’s not that effective when we’re super-sensitive to injustice.”
Kurt Gray (Photo by Donn Young)
Super-sensitivity on the roadway is not useful because you can’t react in a safe way to prevent people from aggressive behaviors. Try to prevent aggressive behavior, and it can escalate into the road rage we frequently see in the news.
“You can’t talk to them or call them,” Gray said. “Ways of dealing with an injustice that evolve for us in a small community are not useful on the road.” Instead, when the rage boils, people let someone know their displeasure in provocative and dangerous ways — offering a middle finger, driving recklessly, tailgating, fighting and, tragically, shooting at each other.
Tamp down your sensitivity to injustice, Gray said. Assume that other drivers behave without thinking and without any intent to harm you.
Shift your focus
Another tactic is to think of drivers as one big, general group, rather than focus on the actions of one person. “Road rage is when you’re upset at one person,” Gray said. “Say you’re a trucker and people cut you off all the time. It happens so much that you see it as a feature of the road and of other drivers in general. That’s just how it works on the road and you can’t blame any one person.”
Gray said that he practices this tactic when driving on campus. “As classes change, students get off the bus and walk while looking at their phones. They walk straight in front of my car.” Instead of focusing on a single student, Gray thinks about the thousands of people moving across campus as one group. “That way, I can’t blame or get angry at any one person for making me late.”
Make charitable assumptions
Stress, feeling rushed or being late all contribute to problems while driving. “We’re likely to get angrier when we’re stressed and feeling rushed. In the holiday season, with lots on your mind, it’s easy to make assumptions about people’s intentions,” Gray said.
How to slow down assumptions? We do that when we have time to check our reactions and think about what people say and do. “It’s not about you, but in your mind it’s always about you,” Gray said. “Instead, they’re probably just in a hurry somewhere, not paying attention and weren’t trying to slight you. Reconsider your initial thoughts and make charitable assumptions.”
Leave earlier, don’t rush
Another important part of driving is to give yourself plenty of time. “If I leave early to get to work and I’m enjoying a podcast, then someone cuts me off, I would think, That was a jerk move. Then I think, Well, that’s all right. I’m not in a huge rush. I‘m sure they had a reason for it. But imagine that I left 10 minutes late for work and someone cuts in front of me. Now there are no distractions. There’s no time to think. Maybe they didn’t mean it, but I’m upset because they’re infringing on my goal.”
In the latter case, Gray said he is at fault. He should have left earlier. Not only that, but he assumes that others know he’s late and that they should act accordingly.
Gray sums up a shortcoming of many drivers with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “We judge others by their actions, but we judge ourselves by our intentions.”
