above-average drivers (particularly men), each of whom seems intent on maintaining their sense of above-averageness. My own unscientific theory is that this may help explain—in America, at least—why drivers polled in surveys seem to find the roads less civil with each passing year. In an 1982 survey, a majority of drivers found that the majority of other people were “courteous” on the road. When the same survey was repeated in 1998, the rude drivers outnumbered the courteous.
How does this tie into pumped-up egos? Psychologists suggest that narcissism, more than insecurity propelled by low self-esteem, promotes aggressive driving. Rather like the survey data that show a mathematical disconnect between the number of sexual partners men and women claim to have had, polls of aggressive driving behavior find more people seeing it than doing it. Someone is self-enhancing. And so narcissism, like road nastiness, seems to be on the rise. Psychologists who examined a survey called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, which has for the past few decades gauged narcissistic indicators in society (measuring reactions to statements like “If I ruled the world, it would be a better place”), found that in 2006, two-thirds of survey respondents scored higher than in 1982. More people than ever, it seems, have a “positive and inflated view of the self.” And over the same period that narcissism was growing, the road, if surveys can be believed, was becoming a less pleasant environment. Traffic, a system that requires conformity and cooperation to function best, was filling with people sharing a common thought: “If I ruled the road, it would be a better place.”
When negative feedback does come our way on the road, we tend to find ways to explain it away, or we quickly forget it. A ticket is a rare event that one grumblingly attributes to police officers having to “make a quota” a honk from another driver is a cause for anger, not shame or remorse; a crash might be seen as pure bad luck. But usually, for most people, there is no negative feedback. There is little feedback at all. We drive largely without incident every day, and every day we become just a little bit more above average. As John Lee, head of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at the University of Iowa, explained, “As an average driver you can get away with a lot before it catches up to you. That’s one of the problems. The feedback loops are not there. You can be a bad driver for years and never really realize it, because you don’t get that demonstrated to you. You could drive for years with a cell phone and say, ‘How can cell phones be dangerous, because I do it every day for two hours and nothing’s happened?’ Well, that’s because you’ve been lucky.”
Even the moments when we almost crash become testaments to our skill, notches on our seat belts. But as psychologist James Reason wrote in
Human Error,
“In accident avoidance, experience is a mixed blessing.” The problem is that we learn how to avoid accidents precisely by avoiding accidents, not by being in accidents. But a near miss, as Reason described it, involves an
initial error
as well as a process of
error recovery.
This raises several questions: Are our near misses teaching us how to avoid accidents or how to prevent the errors that got us into the tight spot to begin with? Does avoiding a minor accident just set us up for having to get out of much bigger accidents? How, and what, do we learn from our mistakes?
What do we learn from mistakes? This last question was also raised by the technology of a company called DriveCam, located in an office park in suburban San Diego, where I spent a day watching video footage of crashes, near crashes, and spectacularly careless acts of driving. The premise is simple: A small camera, located around the rearview mirror, is constantly buffering images (the way TiVo does for your television shows) of the exterior view and the driver. Sensors
How does this tie into pumped-up egos? Psychologists suggest that narcissism, more than insecurity propelled by low self-esteem, promotes aggressive driving. Rather like the survey data that show a mathematical disconnect between the number of sexual partners men and women claim to have had, polls of aggressive driving behavior find more people seeing it than doing it. Someone is self-enhancing. And so narcissism, like road nastiness, seems to be on the rise. Psychologists who examined a survey called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, which has for the past few decades gauged narcissistic indicators in society (measuring reactions to statements like “If I ruled the world, it would be a better place”), found that in 2006, two-thirds of survey respondents scored higher than in 1982. More people than ever, it seems, have a “positive and inflated view of the self.” And over the same period that narcissism was growing, the road, if surveys can be believed, was becoming a less pleasant environment. Traffic, a system that requires conformity and cooperation to function best, was filling with people sharing a common thought: “If I ruled the road, it would be a better place.”
When negative feedback does come our way on the road, we tend to find ways to explain it away, or we quickly forget it. A ticket is a rare event that one grumblingly attributes to police officers having to “make a quota” a honk from another driver is a cause for anger, not shame or remorse; a crash might be seen as pure bad luck. But usually, for most people, there is no negative feedback. There is little feedback at all. We drive largely without incident every day, and every day we become just a little bit more above average. As John Lee, head of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at the University of Iowa, explained, “As an average driver you can get away with a lot before it catches up to you. That’s one of the problems. The feedback loops are not there. You can be a bad driver for years and never really realize it, because you don’t get that demonstrated to you. You could drive for years with a cell phone and say, ‘How can cell phones be dangerous, because I do it every day for two hours and nothing’s happened?’ Well, that’s because you’ve been lucky.”
Even the moments when we almost crash become testaments to our skill, notches on our seat belts. But as psychologist James Reason wrote in
Human Error,
“In accident avoidance, experience is a mixed blessing.” The problem is that we learn how to avoid accidents precisely by avoiding accidents, not by being in accidents. But a near miss, as Reason described it, involves an
initial error
as well as a process of
error recovery.
This raises several questions: Are our near misses teaching us how to avoid accidents or how to prevent the errors that got us into the tight spot to begin with? Does avoiding a minor accident just set us up for having to get out of much bigger accidents? How, and what, do we learn from our mistakes?
What do we learn from mistakes? This last question was also raised by the technology of a company called DriveCam, located in an office park in suburban San Diego, where I spent a day watching video footage of crashes, near crashes, and spectacularly careless acts of driving. The premise is simple: A small camera, located around the rearview mirror, is constantly buffering images (the way TiVo does for your television shows) of the exterior view and the driver. Sensors
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