James, Leon and Nahl, Diane (2002). Dealing With Stress And Pressure In The Vehicle. Taxonomy of Driving Behavior: Affective, Cognitive, Sensorimotor. Chapter In J. Peter Rothe, Editor. Driving Lessons - Exploring Systems That Make Traffic Safer. University of Alberta Press, Edmonton, Canada.
Contents
Why Driving is Stressful
Road Rage and Aggressive Driving
Why Prior Interventions Have Been Unsuccessful
From Traffic Safety to Driving Psychology
Driver Self-Witnessing
The Driver's Threefold Self--Affective, Cognitive, Sensorimotor
The Mental Health Of Drivers
Taxonomy of Driving Behavior
Summary of Current Applications
Basic Principles in Driving Psychology
Applied Programs and Techniques
The Future of Driving
References
Appendix A: Additional Entries for the Taxonomy
Driving in traffic
routinely involves events and incidents. Events are normal sequential maneuvers such as
stopping for the light, changing lanes, or putting on the brakes. Incidents are frequent
but unpredictable events. Some of these are dangerous and frightening, like near-misses,
while others are merely annoying or depressing, like missing one's
turn or being insulted by a motorist. Driving events and incidents are sources of
psychological forces capable of producing powerful feelings and irrational thought
sequences. Driving is a highly dramatic
activity that millions of people perform on a routine daily basis. The drama stems from high risk and
unpredictability. Driving has two conflictual
structural components--predictability and unpredictability.
Both are present all of the time. Predictability,
like maintaining steady speed in one's lane, creates safety, security, and escape from
disaster. Unpredictability, like impulsive
lane changes without signaling, creates danger, stress, and crashes. For many people driving is linked to the value of
freedom of locomotion. On the one hand they
get into cars and drive off where they please, the very symbol
of freedom and independence. But on the other
hand, as they are ready to take off into the open, they encounter restrictions and
constrictions, preventing them from driving as they wish due to regulations and
congestion.
The following list
identifies 15 widely known conflictual aspects of driving that act as stressors. These are emotional challenges that are common
occasions for expressing hostility and aggressiveness on highways and streets.
1.
Immobility: Most of the body during driving remains still and
passive, not like walking where the entire body exerts effort and remains continuously
active. Tension tends to build up when the
body is physically restricted and constricted.
2.
Constriction: Motor vehicles are restricted to narrow bands of
highway and street lanes. In congested
traffic, one's progress is inevitably going to be continuously blocked by numerous other
cars. Being thwarted from going forward when
you expect to, arouses the emotion of restriction and constriction, and along with it,
anxiety and the desire to escape from the constriction.
This anxiety and avoidance prompts drivers to perform risky or aggressive maneuvers
that get them and others into trouble.
3.
Regulation: Driving is a regulated activity, which means that
government agencies and law enforcement officers get to tell drivers how fast to drive
where, and how. Cars and trucks have powerful
engines capable of going faster than what is allowed--ever.
Drivers are punished for violating these regulations which they are responsible for
knowing and obeying. This imposition, though
lawful and necessary, arouses a rebellious streak in many people, which then allows them
to regularly disregard whatever regulations seem wrong to them at the time or in the mood
they are in.
4.
Lack
of control: Traffic follows the laws that
govern flow patterns like rivers, pipes, blood vessels, and streaming molecules. In congested traffic, the flow depends on the
available spaces around the cars, as can be ascertained from an aerial view such as a
traffic helicopter, or from a bridge above the highway.
When one car slows down, hundreds of other cars behind run out of space and must
tap their brakes to slow down or stop altogether, as in gridlock. No matter how one drives, it's not possible to beat
the traffic waves, whose cause or origin starts miles from where you are. This lack of control over what happens is
frustrating, stress producing, and tends to lead to venting one's anger on whoever is
around--another driver, a passenger, a pedestrian, a construction worker, the government.
5.
Being put in danger: Cars are loved by their owners and they are
expensive to fix. Even a scratch is stress
producing because it reduces the car's value and is expensive to repair. Congested traffic filled with impatient and
aggressive drivers creates many hair raising close calls and hostile incidents within a
few minutes of each other. Physiological
stress is thus produced, along with many negative emotions--fear, resentment, rage,
helplessness, bad mood, and depression.
6.
Territoriality: The symbolic portrayal of the car has tied it to
individual freedom and self-esteem, promoting a mental attitude of defensiveness and
territoriality. Motorists consider the space
inside the car as their castle and the space around the car as their territory. The result is that they repeatedly feel insulted or
invaded while they drive, lulling them into a hostile mental state, even to warlike
postures and aggressive reactions to routine incidents that are suddenly perceived as
skirmishes, battles, or duels between drivers. For
many motorists, driving has become a dreaded daily drudge, an emotional roller coaster
difficult to contain and a source of danger and stress.
7.
Diversity: There are about 200 million licensed drivers in
8.
Multi-tasking: The increase in dashboard complexity and in-car
activities like eating, talking on the phone, checking voice e-mail, challenge people's
ability to remain alert and focused behind the wheel. Drivers
become more irritated at each other when their attention or alertness seems to be lacking
due to multi-tasking behind the wheel. Multi-tasking
without adequate training increases stress by dividing attention and reducing alertness.
9.
Denying
our mistakes: Driving is typically done by
automatic habits compiled over years, and this means that much of it is outside people's
conscious awareness. Typically drivers tend to
exaggerate their own "excellence," overlooking their many mistakes. When passengers complain or, when other drivers are
endangered by these mistakes, there is a strong tendency to deny the mistakes and to see
complaints as unwarranted. This denial allows
drivers to feel self-righteous and indignant at others, enough to want to punish and
retaliate, adding to the general hostility and stress level on highways.
10.
Cynicism: Many people have learned to drive under the
supervision of parents and teachers who are critical and judgmental. We don’t just learn to manipulate the vehicle;
we also acquire an over-critical mental attitude towards it.
As children we're exposed to this constant judgmental behavior of our parents who
drive us around. It's also reinforced in
movies portraying drivers behaving badly. This
culture of mutual cynicism among motorists promotes an active and negative emotional life
behind the wheel. Negative emotions are stress
producing.
11.
Loss of objectivity: Driving incidents are not neutral: there is always someone who is considered to be at
fault. There is a natural tendency to want to
attribute fault to others rather than to self. This
self-serving bias even influences the memory of what happened, slanting the guilt away
from self and laying it on others. Drivers
lose objectivity and right judgment when a dispute comes up.
Subjectivity increases stress by strengthening the feeling that one has been
wronged.
12.
Venting: Part of our cultural heritage is the ability to
vent anger by reciting all the details of another individual's objectionable behavior. The nature of venting is such that it increases by
its own logic until it breaks out into overt hostility and even physical violence. It requires motivation and self-training to bring
venting under control before it explodes into the open.
Until it's brought under conscious control, venting is felt as an energizing
"rush" and promotes aggressiveness and violence.
Nevertheless, this seductive feeling is short-lived and is accompanied by a stream
of anger-producing thoughts that impair our judgment and tempt us into rash and dangerous
actions. Repeated venting takes its toll on
the immune system and acts as physiological stress with injurious effects on the
cardio-vascular system (Williams and Williams, 1993).
13.
Unpredictability: The street and highway create an environment of
drama, danger, and uncertainty. In addition
heat, noise and smells act as physiological stress and aggravate feelings of frustration
and resentment. Competition, hostility, and
rushing further intensify the negative emotions. The
driving environment has become tedious, brutish, and dangerous, difficult to adjust to on
the emotional plane.
14.
Ambiguity: Motorists don't have an accepted or official
gestural communication language. There is no
easy way of saying "Oops, I'm sorry!" as we do in a bank line. This allows for ambiguity to arise: "Did he just flip me off or was that an
apology?" It would no doubt help if
vehicles were equipped with an electronic display allowing drivers to flash pre-recorded
messages. Lack of clear communication between
motorists creates ambiguity, which contributes to stress.
15.
Undertrained in emotional
intelligence: Traditionally, driver education was conceived as
acquainting students with some general principles of safety, followed by a few hours of
supervised hands-on experience behind the wheel, or on a driving simulator. Developing sound judgment and emotional
self-control were not part of the training, even though these goals were mentioned as
essential. Most drivers today are untrained or
under-trained, in cognitive and affective skills. Cognitive
skills are good habits of thinking and judgment. Affective
skills are good habits of attitude and motivation. Drivers
thus lack the necessary coping abilities such as how to cool off when angered or
frustrated, or how to cooperate with the traffic flow and not hinder it. This lack of training in emotional intelligence
(Goleman, 1995) creates high stress conditions for most drivers.
It is common to relate
aggressiveness to social and environmental factors, in addition to individual personality
factors. For instance, congestion on highways
and anonymity in cars interact with faulty attitudes and inadequate coping skills to
produce aggressive traffic behavior under certain identifiable critical conditions. These apparent triggering conditions are accidental
because they are unpredictable, and involve symbolic meaning for the dignity or self-worth
of the interactants who may later report having felt insulted or threatened. It is part of popular psychology to call these
provocative and dramatic conditions "triggers" as in, "It's not my fault.
He provoked me. It's his fault. He made me do
it." The trigger theory of anger serves
to absolve the perpetrator from some or all of the responsibility for the aggression or
violence. Here the attackers see themselves as
the victims through a self-serving speech act (Searle, 1969) by which they escape
culpability and opprobrium. It is common for
road ragers to show no remorse for their assault and battery, seeing what they did as
justified and deserved.
For millions of people
driving has become a health risk, an economic risk, and a daily hassle, if not tragedy. The highway environment has turned hostile and
dangerous. Government regulation of traffic
and transportation has vastly increased. A
dozen states have passed aggressive driving bills that change what was
merely a ticket and a check, to a misdemeanor or a felony, with mandatory classes in how
to manage your traffic emotions. Law
enforcement initiatives against aggressive drivers are called "aggressive
initiatives" while federal agencies are promoting the use of integrated action
between several forces, including helicopter support.
Society's war on aggressive driving appears to be accelerating in the media and on
the World Wide Web where numerous activist groups promote citizen involvement in
monitoring and reporting the license plates of aggressive drivers. The appearance in this politicizing of aggressive
driving is that aggressive drivers are a group of dangerous people like car thieves or
bank robbers. But my research on what drivers
think and feel behind the wheel convinces me that aggressive driving is a cultural norm,
not a deviant behavior. We acquire these
hostile driving norms in childhood as passengers and as adults,
we practice the cultural habit and pass it on to our children. Individual differences remain so that the frequency
and modality of expressing hostility is conditioned by social factors--gender, education,
age, personality style, demeanor, or conduct. For
instance, we would expect gender differences in driving aggressiveness to be consistent
with cultural norms for violence in the family or workplace.
Some relevant findings from a Web survey of 2010 respondents in
1988 (James, 1998). They were
responding to itemized lists of driving behaviors often considered aggressive and illegal. By checking an item, the respondent was making a
confession or a self-witnessing report "I sometimes engage in this behavior." By tabulating the results in terms of demographic
variables, one can explore various cultural influences on specific forms of aggressive
driving.
MEN
WOMEN
making illegal turns
18%
12%
not signaling lane
changes
26%
20%
following very close
15%
13%
going through red lights
9%
7%
swearing, name calling
59%
57%
speeding 15 to 25 mph
46%
32%
yelling at another driver
34%
31%
honking to protest
39%
36%
revving engine to
retaliate
12%
8%
making an insulting
gesture
28%
20%
tailgating dangerously
14%
9%
shining bright lights to
retaliate
25%
13%
braking suddenly to
punish
35%
29%
deliberately cutting off
19%
10%
using car to block the
way
21%
13%
using car as weapon to
attack
4%
1%
chasing a car in hot
pursuit
15%
4%
getting into a physical
fight
4%
1%
For
each of these aggressive driving behavior, more men report doing it than women. The differences in percentage points are
statistically significant for all items. These
results confirm what earlier surveys have found, that men drive more aggressively than
women and manifest road rage symptoms more regularly.
However, popular surveys also show a growing number of women are engaging in
aggressive driving behavior and are involved in a higher rate of non-fatal accidents than
men (Woman Motorist, 1999). The greater
aggressiveness of men drivers and the increasing aggressiveness of women drivers are
cultural trends reflecting an expanding permissiveness towards the expression of anger
behind the wheel. Some of the rise in women's
aggressive driving is attributed to the increased presence of women in the workplace. There are 88 million licensed women drivers in the
Health professionals
generally attribute part of the increase in driving "pugnacity" to social
factors such as swelling congestion, urbanization, dual-income families, workplace
downsizing that increases crowding, family discord, job dissatisfaction, and physical
illness. The connection between stress and
illness has long been established in medicine and new research shows that driving related
stress is no different from life stress in the way it affects our health (APA Monitor,
1996). The overt expression of anger and
hostile behavior is normally "inhibited" or kept under wraps because we are
directly or indirectly punished for it in various ways.
In the past decade, public schools have implemented conflict resolution or peer
mediation programs designed to help children acquire the habit of resolving disagreements
non-physically, non-violently (Goleman, 1995). The
key element of this civilized conduct is the skill of inhibiting the physical expression
of anger or fear, so it doesn't come out in provocative or violent behavior. When a neighbor encroaches upon your territory,
normally you don't start shooting or suing. You
first find out what's going on, why, and what you can do about it peacefully and lawfully,
such as talking it over or lodging a complaint. This
principle of non-aggressiveness has been thrown overboard by the culture of cynicism on
highways. As educators and change agents, we
must find ways to restore it.
Perhaps the biggest cause
of unsafe highways is people's unwillingness to scrutinize their own conduct, preferring
to blame other drivers. Surveys consistently
show that most people have an inflated self-image of their motoring ability, rating the
safety of their own driving as much better than the average motorist's. For instance, two out of three drivers (67 percent)
rate themselves almost perfect in excellence as a driver (9 or 10 on a 10-point scale),
while the rest consider themselves above average (6 to 8).
Surveys typically show that 70 percent of drivers report being a victim of an
aggressive driver, while only 30 percent admit to being aggressive drivers. This suggests that most drivers overlook their own
faults and overestimate their competence. One
way to examine this hypothesis is to compare the aggressiveness of the two-thirds majority
of drivers who rate themselves as near perfect with the one-third minority that see
themselves "above average, but with some room to improve."
The difference is
dramatic! The drivers
who considered themselves near perfect in excellence with no room for improvement, also
confess to significantly more aggressiveness than drivers who see themselves still
improving. This reveals the lack of
objectivity in self-assessment shown by two out of three drivers. Despite their self-confessed aggressiveness, they
still insist on thinking of themselves as near perfect drivers with almost no room to
improve. This egocentric phenomenon can be
seen in specific forms of aggressive behaviors. For
example, those who see themselves as near perfect drivers, admit to twice as much chasing
of other cars compared to those who see themselves as less perfect. The difference:
15 percent vs. 8 percent is statistically significant. The fact is clear:
part of being an aggressive driver is to deny that you need to improve. This is what I call resistance to change.
in Reducing Dangerous Driver Behavior
In
1.
more
and better roads
thus,
safer roads with better traction, visibility, and maintenance
2.
better
designed cars
thus,
cars equipped with better safety devices and crash proof designs that save
lives—safety belt, air bag, child restraint car seat, shock absorption and controlled
collapse, crash tests with dummies
3.
better
medical emergency services and infrastructure on highways and streets
thus,
more survivors after crashes
4.
better
law enforcement
including,
more personnel, use of electronic surveillance devices on highways and key intersections,
new legislation to facilitate the conviction of guilty drivers, greater involvement of
courts in remedial driver training for offenders
5.
mandated
driver and safety education in schools
including
graduated licensing and other special provisions for elderly and handicapped drivers
6.
more
sophisticated transportation management systems
computer
controlled traffic lights, traffic calming devices, re-routing schemes, HOV lanes,
alternative transportation initiatives
7.
economic
incentives for drivers who remain accident free
added insurance cost for accident prone
drivers, increased incentives or insurance reductions for accident-free drivers, special
benefits accruing to enrolling in refresher courses and other self-improvement activities
It’s important to
note that despite these definite and significant improvements in the seven areas
indicated, the rate of traffic deaths and injuries remains relatively constant when viewed
over a long term perspective of years and decades. For instance, in the 1950s the annual
fatality rate due to driving accidents was around 50,000 while in the 1990s it has been
around 40,000. Yes, there is a reduction, but the curve has quickly leveled off and
remains above 40,000 deaths and over 5 million injuries annually in the
On the one hand, the
external environmental forces for greater safety (less risk):
The
construction of more and better highways to accommodate the increasing numbers of drivers
every year
The design
of better and safer vehicles
A more
efficient medical infrastructure to handle victims of crashes
Greater
use of highway law enforcement and electronic surveillance as deterrents
And on the other hand,
the internal individual forces for maintaining high risk (less safety):
The
widespread acceptance of a competitive norm that values getting ahead of other drivers
The daily
round schedule of time pressure and its mismanagement through rushing and disobeying
traffic laws
The
weakness of driver education programs so that most drivers have inadequate training in
emotional self-control as drivers
The media
portrayal of aggressive driving behaviors in a fun context
The
psychological tendency to maintain a preferred level of risk, so that increased risks are
taken when environmental improvements are introduced (also called "risk
homeostasis", see Wilde, 1994; 1988)
Scientists and safety
officials attribute this resistance to accident reduction to the attitude and behavior of
drivers who tend to respond to safety improvements by driving more dangerously. It has
been noted that a critical aspect of driving is the driver’s competence in balancing
risk with safety. The risk in driving is largely under the control of the driver. The
driver decides at every moment what risks to take and what to
inhibit or avoid. Risk taking is a tendency that varies greatly between drivers as well as
for the same driver at different times. Thus, if a road is made safer by straightening it,
or by moving objects that interfere with visibility, drivers will compensate for the
greater safety by driving faster on it—the so-called "risk homeostasis"
phenomenon. The result is the maintenance of a constant subjective feeling of risk that is
the normal habitual threshold for a particular driver. In such a driving environment, the
rate of deaths or injuries tends to remain high, despite the safety improvements that are
introduced.
The institutional or
societal response to this stalemate between safety and risk tolerance,
has been to increase enforcement activities by monitoring, ticketing, and jailing hundreds
of thousands of drivers. Nevertheless, the number of deaths and injuries has remained
nearly steady, year after year. Besides law enforcement, there has been an increase in
litigation due to aggressive driving disputes between drivers, as well as more
psychotherapy and counseling services, including anger management clinics and workshops,
and community initiatives. Nevertheless, these remain scattered attempts, and have been
unable to alter basic driving patterns. As
detailed in this chapter, socio-cultural methods need to be used to change the driving
norms of an entire generation.
Driver education and
training continue to focus on imparting a minimum knowledge of safety principles and of
vehicle operation and manipulation. Courses
and manuals generally include a brief section on "driver attitude" and
"driver error" and this practice constitutes an acknowledgment that personality
habits of the driver ought to be addressed in the instructional process. My research efforts have addressed this behavioral
component, and to allow specific recognition of this subject in driver education and
training, I have proposed the phrase "driving psychology" to represent this new
driver instruction area. Driving psychology
refers to the knowledge drivers need to cumulate throughout their career as
driver--between six and seven decades for most people in
Driving psychology is a
behavioral engineering tool. Research in
driving psychology uses the self-witnessing approach, which is a method of generating
objective data on oneself as a driver (James, 1996). The
driver operates in three separate but interacting behavioral areas known as affective,
cognitive, and sensorimotor. In other words,
it takes the motive of a goal destination (affective domain) to keep the car moving, as
well as a variety of related motives (affective) such as the desire (affective) to avoid a
collision or the emotion of anger (affective) at another driver. Besides this, it takes knowledge (cognitive domain)
of vehicle operation and traffic regulations to get through, besides making judgments
(cognitive) about what other motorists are likely to do or not to do. And finally, it also takes the coordinated
execution or performance (sensorimotor domain) of movements in appropriate response to the
motive and the judgment. These three
behavioral domains jointly and interactively constitute driving or traffic behavior. My proposal for Lifelong Driver Self-Improvement
Training has the purpose of empowering drivers to take charge of their habit structures in
these three behavioral areas.
The new driving
psychology and the older traffic psychology represent distinct paradigms to the study of
driver behavior, as was anticipated by the distinction between input-output relations and
those involving internal states (Michon, 1985). Input-output models use taxonomies or
inventories based on task analyses, as well as functional control models of a mechanistic
nature. Internal state models use trait analyses of drivers and their
motivational-cognitive context. Michon (1985, p. 490) considers the input-output models as
"behavioral" while the internal states models are termed
"psychological." However, driving psychology views the affective and cognitive
areas as equally behavioral to the sensorimotor. Inventories of driver tasks have so far
been based on external or public observation and description of driving performance
(McKnight and Adams, 1970). The self-witnessing approach is a way of obtaining internal
behavioral data, sometimes called "private data."
Driving psychology is the
study of the social-psychological forces that act upon drivers in traffic. Situations are
analyzed through external as well as internal methods of data gathering. For example, in
one study the aggressiveness of drivers was measured in terms of observed rate of speed
reduction, or the making of some hostile gesture at pedestrians in a marked crosswalk. It
was found that aggressiveness of both men and women drivers was
higher against men pedestrians than women pedestrians. This is an instance of the external
analysis of driver behavior. In another study, drivers spoke their thoughts out loud into
a tape recorder giving their perceptions and reactions to traffic events and incidents. It
was found that the average trip from home and work is filled with many incidents that
arouse feelings of hostility and thoughts of mental violence (James, 1987). This is an
instance of the driver's internal behavior. An approach that involves both internal and
external analyses consists of interviewing drivers about their driving, either "in
depth" or on a questionnaire, and relating it to their self-witnessing records. One
may also have observers independently make observations of drivers who are making
self-witnessing tapes, which also allows the correlation or concurrence of external and
internal data.
Personality and character
are related to a driver's style of coping with traffic stress. Acts, thoughts, and
feelings in driving interact in an integrated system. A driving trip typically involves
the presence of a dominant motive such as the feeling of being in a rush, or the desire to
outplay other drivers by getting ahead of them. The dominant motive (affective domain) is
a character tendency that expresses itself in other settings as well. For example, a
person may experience hostile thoughts (cognitive behavior) towards others wherever
competition is at work, whether a bank line, a restaurant, or switching traffic lanes
(sensorimotor domain). Data on the private world of drivers show that frustration begets
anger, which leads to feelings of hostility that are elaborated in mental violence and
ridicule, and finally acted out in aggressive behavior.
It is evident that the aggressive behavior is an outward consequence of an inner
interplay between the negative feeling and its conscious justification or condoning. This threefold aspect of driving behavior is at the
center of driving psychology.
The topics of driving
psychology often overlap with traffic psychology or applied psychology, but the method of generating the data are distinctive. One example is the study of risk taking in driving
(Wilde, 1994). Few traffic situations are without risk. Drivers are constantly involved
with this risk. Incidents occur all the time and the threat involved is experienced as
stress. Reduction of traffic stress is a major concern for both driving psychology and
applied traffic psychology. In the old paradigm methods include extending traffic safety
education to children, providing driver education for adolescents, and continuing driver
education for adults through courses, legislation, and public media campaigns. Driving
psychology adds a new major component to these methods, namely the idea that driver
training is lifelong self-training, and that it involves training our emotional habits in
traffic, our thinking habits behind the wheel, and our style or overt actions for which we
are legally and socially responsible.
Educators and test makers
have used the thinking out loud verbalizations of college students to study their problem
solving abilities (Bloom, 1956). Meichenbaum and Goodman (1979) and Watson and Tharp
(1985) have made use of silent verbalizations in the form of self-regulatory sentences
that mediate and control the overt performance of students and clients in need of greater
self-control of their behavior in many areas (Luria, 1961). Abelson (1981) has proposed
script analysis as a method of reconstructing the cognitive activities that underlie
routine behaviors such as ordering food in a restaurant.
Ericsson and Simon (1984) have described their extensive attempts in protocol
analysis which involves the tape recording of a subject's thinking aloud routine while
engaged in problem solving activity of specific tasks (e.g., solving a chess problem). This work allowed Simon to create the first chess
playing computer program by rendering each thinking sequence into a program line. More recently, the MIT media lab is known to be
creating computers that not only model human cognitive processes but affective as well
(Picard, 1997). These research and clinical efforts represent significant advances in the
scientific study of the private world of individuals. The self-witnessing technique I developed is an attempt
to obtain reliable data on the ongoing events in the private world of drivers. This
psychological aspect of driving has not received attention in the extensive literature of
driving or auto safety. The method was also used in the analysis of self-witnessing
reports written by students while engaged in doing library research or using Web search
engines (Nahl, 1998; 1997; Nahl and James, 1996).
The self-witnessing
method is readily meaningful to people since they are routinely expected in their daily
lives as part of being ordinary humans or citizens, to be able to report on their own
activities (What did you do? Who was there? etc.) and mental focus (What did you
think? What did you feel? etc.). Drivers readily discuss many aspects of their
driving behavior, external and internal. For example, when people are asked to write an
introduction about themselves as drivers, they spontaneously mention various aspects about
themselves such as how long they have been driving; what kind of cars they can drive (gear
shift or automatic); how driving affects everyday life (its costs, dangers, frustrations,
stress); what images they project as a driver (power, status, lifestyle); whether they
consider themselves to be a good or bad driver; how they react to common driving
situations; how their mood changes as a result of driving episodes; how the traffic went
on a particular trip; their driving record (traffic tickets, accidents, near misses); and
some others. These are thus dimensions of discrimination along which drivers spontaneously
monitor themselves, or have the conviction that they monitor themselves. These beliefs may
be called the driver's self-image, or the reputation of oneself as a driver. There is a lot of protective territoriality or face
work defensiveness associated with these beliefs about oneself.
Interviews with drivers,
or written self-assessment scales filled out by drivers, yield retrospective data in which
the respondents' recollection of facts is mixed with their self-image as drivers. By
contrast, self-witnessing reports yield data that are not retrospective but on-going or
concurrent. The driver behind the wheel speaks
out loud into a recorder at the very moment that the emotions, thoughts, perceptions, and
actions arise spontaneously and concurrently with the act of driving. Later analysis of
the tape and transcript displays in concrete and visible terms, the overt expressions of
feelings, thoughts, and perceptions that accompanied a particular driving episode. This method does not claim to obtain a complete and
accurate "online transaction log" of the driver's affective states and cognitive
processes, but only a sample of these. The adequacy of the sample needs to be evaluated
theoretically and practically. The initial effort in driving psychology has been the
attempt to develop a taxonomy of driving behavior so that there
might be a theoretically justified classification system capable of listing driver
behaviors in the three domains and at relative levels of attainment or development.
In its
modern version, behaviorism is committed to a unified theory that tries to deal with
external and internal aspects of the self (Staats, 1975; Mischel, 1991). For instance, the
concept of personality is defined in terms of built-up repertoires of basic habits. These
are actually skills and errors that can be modified through further learning. This
acquisition process is going on in three distinct domains of the person's activity:
affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor. All
skills at any level of expertise contain affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor features. The following transcript segment from a driver's
taped self-witnessing record illustrates the threefold nature of driving behavior.
"Oh, no, there's a
police car coming up from behind. I hope he didn't see me driving fast. Besides, I'm not
the only one who is driving fast. If he pulls me over to the side, he has to pull everyone
else over too. I'll be so embarrassed if he pulls me over. Everyone will know that I was
breaking the law."
Content analysis focuses
on the "speech act" value of the components of verbalizations (Searle, 1969;
Nahl, 1993). For instance, "Oh, no" marks an affective stricture or a perception
of doom; and indexes an emotional flooding-out. "I hope" marks a religious
affection or an idealized picture of reality. "Besides, I'm not the only one"
bespeaks guilt and self-justification; it raises the specter of personal catastrophe
expressed in "I'll be so embarrassed... Everyone will know..." A little later
this subject displays affections of condemnation or disapproval when another car cut in
front: "Careless and pushy drivers always do things like that." In another
episode, this person expresses anxiety and fear: "I almost sideswiped a car which had
been traveling in my blind spot. As I was turning back into the middle lane I was in a
state of mild anxiety. Thinking about what could've happened made me scared." Thus,
expressing fear in a driving incident or, showing disapproval of another driver, are instances of affective driving behavior. An individual's internal dialog can be used as an
index of the affective states and the cognitive processes that constitute the internal
component of any outward behavior.
"I should cut down
on how fast I'm driving and maintain the required speed limit. I'm in the middle lane and
yet I'm driving like an aggressive person in the left lane. I could be increasing my
chance of becoming a victim on the road. If the police pulls me over and gives me a ticket
it's nobody else's fault but my own. I should follow the rules. I don't want others to get
a bad impression of me and think that I'm a speed demon."
Reasoning about propriety
is evident in "I should maintain the proper speed limit" and "I'm driving
like an aggressive person" which also indicates self-evaluation
("aggressive"). Propriety as well as morality scales are involved in the
driver's reasonings regarding the self-attribution of error. ("It's nobody else's
fault but my own"), while the entry "I don't want others to get a bad impression
of me" reveals this person's image management techniques. In the following entry the driver seems to be
overwhelmed with the reasoned consequences of his action:
"I'm thinking to
myself I could have killed the guy back there. I'm so careless. He must be swearing at me
and saying what an idiot I am. I could've smashed up my brother's car."
Note that this self-analysis includes imagining what the others are thinking, feeling, or saying ("He must be swearing..."). Witnessing and describing one's reasoning about a driving situation, or attributing an error to oneself, prov