While personality traits can predispose individuals to engage in riskier road driving, societal biases can also prevent people from realizing that their driving behavior could be reckless.
It appears that several car-driving behaviors may have an underlying psychological explanation.
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Inflated Self-Perceptions and Road Safety
Generally, drivers are quite bad at judging their driving skills. According to studies in the US, most survey participants think of themselves as being better than average when it comes to driving.
Sally Kyd, a criminal law expert from the University of Leicester, explained that pedestrians are likely to engage in risky driving if they see themselves as experts. This is because they think that driving laws do not apply to them.
One explanation for the gap between self-rated and actual driving behavior is a discrepancy in thinking about what constitutes safe or skillful drives.
Steven Love, a cognitive psychology and road safety researcher from the MAIC/UniSC Road Safety Research Collaboration, said recent studies have suggested that the main cause of negative road interactions is friction between different driving styles.
Aggressive drivers tend to call out slow drivers. On the other hand, patient drivers usually think that reckless drivers are a problem.
It should also be stressed that policies and infrastructure that take road safety for granted end up enabling reckless driving. Nevertheless, drivers' individual behaviors are also important.
According to Kyd, the underlying behavior must be addressed. This means that drivers must think that they can be disciplined and caught whenever they engage in dangerous driving, not only when they crash, which they believe will not happen.
Moreover, stronger sentences for reckless driving should be coupled with stronger enforcement. This is necessary to boost the odds of catching reckless drivers before tragedies happen.
Environmental psychologist Ian Walker from Swansea University points to a learning theory, noting that one of its basic elements is that if actions do not have immediate consequences, bad learning results. He says that people are not getting the feedback that they need.
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Motonormativity
For Walker, road safety psychological insights should also cover whole societies that share dangerous biases regarding driving.
He explains that something odd happens when people from car-centric societies take time to think about driving. He notes safety campaigns that encourage children to wear bright clothing so that they can be spotted on roads.
He thinks these campaigns could be seen as teaching children that it is their fault if they get run over, noting how easily they can slip into what could be perceived as victim blaming.
According to Walker's analysis, this serves as a "special pleading" example, which is an unconscious bias that involves considering some cases as exceptions to society's norms. Despite its environmental and health harms, driving holds a special status across various societies. Walker and his colleagues refer to this as "motonormativity."
In a study, Walker's team discovered that people were more likely to agree to statements critical of certain activities, like smoking, than driving, even though they do not contribute to air pollution.
Walker also said that non-drivers may internalize pervasive cultural messaging. He notes that people who are not in a c are relayed a clear message: that they are the ones who wait and should be regarded as less important.
Walker thinks that, because of motonormativity, several people believe that encouraging less driving could limit freedom. He notes that the first step would be to acknowledge a problem.
He explains that he does not know how much progress can be made until individual and collective acknowledgment of cars' harms is made.
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