The Effect of Age, Gender, and Type of Car Driven by Dr. Leon James

Summary of Findings

I take these results to be evidence that aggressive driving is a cultural norm that we acquire from parents and the media. These anti-social practices behind the wheel have become a tradition. Children imbibe them, boys and girls each in their own ways, suitable to their gender and age. Our driver education begins as infants while riding in cars driven by adults who yell, curse, swear, make insulting gestures, break driving regulations like going through red light or doing some serious speeding. Everyone of these aggressive and hostile behaviors is documented in this national survey of 1095 drivers.

The culturally transmitted norms of aggressive driving are not unitary and rigid, but vary demographically through the population. Drivers behave badly in a variety of ways, and these varieties are influenced by geographic state and type of car. Numerous statistically significant results are presented in dozens of graphs and tables throughout this document so that everyone can examine the pattern of relationships between specific types of aggressive behaviors in relation to age of drivers, their gender, the type of car they drive, and the state they drive in.

As a society, therefore, we must recognize that cultural transmission and tradition are responsible factors in aggressive driving, and contribute to it. Therefore cultural techniques of re-education are needed to reverse the generational trend. We can collect all sorts of advice and hints for how to stop the increase in aggressive driving. If this trend is not reversed, we can expect aggressive driving to increase, despite the more extensive law enforcement and electronic 'surveillance' initiatives that are being instituted throughout the country.

The full solution or elimination of this problem lies in consciously and deliberately reversing the cultural tradition that allows us to express hostility behind the wheel (see here for a list of the top complaints drivers have about one another). It's obvious that feelings run very intense and to solve this problem is easier said than done. In my role as DrDriving, I have been providing various types of self-management tools and socially dynamic methods of motivating drivers to accept the idea of Lifelong Driver Education as a matter of social responsibility, as outlined above in this document. The overall goal of driver education must be explicitly stated in positive terms, rather than merely negative.

The goal must be to evolve a cultural norm for driving that can be called Supportive Driving, in opposition to Aggressive Driving. Oddly enough, research by psychologists has remained limited to a few problems--see my large bibliography of driving research here. We need to understand the difference between these two opposing driving styles and philosophies. Car society is now beginning its second century. For the first century society was able to license drivers through minimal training and examination, and this approach worked for a while, but things started braking down in the 1950s when more and more drivers began to drive the fast moving vehicles placed in their hands. The death rate climbed to above 50,000 for many years. It was brought down to its current 42,000 fatalities a year through better car design, better road engineering, more safety laws, better paramedical services.

Still, 42,000 fatalities year after year turns the highways into war zones (about 50,000 American fatalities were incurred in the entire six-year Vietnam war). Add to this amazing carnage, 6 million crashes with enormous suffering and disruption to lives for millions, and an economic cost of 200 billion per year, and you begin to realize that we are having an enormously serious problem to fix. The goal: to turn the 177 million drivers in this nation (the number is climbing...) into Supportive Drivers. Since this philosophy is contrary to tradition, habit, and convenience we are faced with people's massive opposition to their self-transformation. Drivers have their own theory as to why drivers makes them mad. These popular but non-adaptive attitudes and rationalizations must be abandoned in favor of emotionally more intelligent alternatives.

I have been studying this resistance to driver self-improvement for two decades, first in myself, then with other drivers as well. A necessary departing strategy had to be the identification of aggressive behaviors by drivers. This led to a taxonomy or inventory of hundreds of driving behaviors in three areas of the driver's habits: affective (the driver's attitudes, motives, and moral feelings), cognitive (the driver's emotional intelligence and judgment), and sensorimotor (the driver's vehicle manipulation (including gestures and verbalizations). I also used this taxonomy of driver behaviors to catalogue the complaints drivers have about one another. You can get the details by examining the various links I provided for each topic in my table outlining the details of lifelong driver education. I have also used this approach in a video course for driver re-education based on these same objectives.

A nationally representative telephone survey of 1000 adult licensed drivers was conducted by Global Strategy Group between March 17 and March 28, 2000. Concurrent telephone surveys were conducted with approximately 100 adult licensed drivers in each of five cities Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis. A summary of the key findings from the national and city-specific surveys was then developed. The margin error is + 3.1%.

Overview of the Findings thus far...

The pattern of results thus far lead me to the following conclusions:

Aggressive driving is made up of a syndrome of habits that stick together with plenty of individual variation.

Young drivers are more aggressive in all driving behaviors than older drivers; senior drivers are the least aggressive.

Men are more aggressive than women when they drive sports cars and light trucks (S-10, Pick-up, Ram, Ranger, F-150, Silverado, Dakota, etc.); women are more aggressive than men when they drive SUVs and luxury cars. For economy and family cars, it depends on the specific behavior.

There appear to be three psychological categories of vehicles people drive: tough driving cars (sports, light trucks, SUVs), soft driving cars (economy, family), and special driving cars (vans, luxury). Each of these psychological categories has its own aggressive driving syndrome that distinguishes it from the others.

It is evident that aggressive driving is a cultural norm that is generationally transmitted as a habit imbibed in childhood when riding with parents and reinforced by repeated media portrayals of drivers behaving badly. To get us out of this, I propose a program of Lifelong Driver Education.

Now for the details, look below. It takes me many hours to tabulate, analyze, present, and write up the survey results--but it is a labor of love. As DrDriving, I feel it my duty to help the public gain understanding of the aggressive driving problem. Enjoy! And I'd be delighted to read your comments! E-mail DrDriving

The Second Sample:

The sample was made up of 1095 people who clicked on the link that announces DrDriving's Road Rage Survey on my site, and decided to fill it out. The answers were entirely anonymous, as the form did not collect name information. No other information such as cookies was obtained. The time period was between September 23, 1998 and January 16, 1999. The mean age was 28 with an overall range of 14 to 94 years old. However, the distribution for years of experience for this sample of 1095 is highly skewed, with the majority of the sample having less than 10 years experience. Click here to see the distribution.

There were somewhat more male respondents (612) than female (475). I think that this sample would be representative of that portion of our general population that is Internet literate. Note that this second sample of 1095 drivers is entirely different and independent from the earlier survey reported here.

Although we cannot consider this group of 1095 respondents as a random sample, nor a representative sample of the 177 million US drivers, we can make legitimate comparisons between the demographic sub-groups that happen to be in the sample. For instance, the largest sub-group had less than 10 years driving experience, but there were smaller sub-groups that had a lot more experience: over 100 drivers (or 10% of the sample) had up to 24 years of experience, and almost as many had 30 years of experience. So we can do a statistical comparison between these sub-groups, and if it comes out significant, you can generalize the results to all drivers in that age category.

By policy, I present only significant results, though once in a while I will use a "strong trend" if there is statistical indication that with increased size of the sample, the strong trend will turn into a significant difference.

By tradition and accepted standards, I use the 5% error rate (that is, the 95% significance rate) for significance levels, though with large samples such as this, the significance levels are typically much higher (p<.0001) as you'll see by inspecting the Tables provided with each Graph.

I will discuss four interrelated issues: the Gender Issue; the Age Issue; and the Type of Car Issue. I will also discuss Geographic Location by State. By clicking on the sub-headings for each survey item I analyze, you can inspect the Tables and the Graphs for that item. Then please click Back to continue here.

If you look at the survey form itself, you'll be able to see better what the numbers mean. I use two types of numbers: a scale from 1 to 10 and percentages. All results are in these two types of numbers. For example, when you click on the link below, AGGRESSIVENESS SELF-RATING--by Gender and Type of Car, you'll see statistical tables and graphs. The Tables show you the size of each group ("Count"), the mean for that scale or percentage, and significance tests ("P-Value"). The Bar Graph and the Line Graph show the same thing. As the survey form shows, How Do You Rate Your Own Aggressiveness as a Driver (item 9), is measured on a scale from 1 (slight) to 10 (strong). The vertical for the bar graph shows that male drivers of sports cars rate themselves near 7 while male drivers of vans rate themselves under 6 -- a highly significant difference as show by the p Value Table.

Similarly with percentages. For instance if you click on the link below for SWEARING--by Type of Car and Gender, you can see that the Mean for female drivers of sports cars ("sports, F") is 73% (.729 X 100= 72%). This means that 72% of female van drivers report swearing and cussing on a regular basis. On the other hand, for male drivers of economy cars ("economy,M") the percentage is 46% (.459X100=46%). This means that 46% of male drivers of economy cars confess to swearing on a regular basis. In this way you can interpret the other Tables and Graphs.

Overall, men describe themselves higher on aggressiveness than women: 5.5 for women vs. 6 for men. This is statistically significant. In terms of size of the difference, half a scale unit on a 10-point scale amounts to 5% difference (from 5.5 to 6 on a 10-point scale). This is not a large difference, yet is consistent, and therefore it grows cumulatively. For example, a 5% reduction in national crash rates (about 5 million per year), would save 2000 lives a year, 250,000 injuries, and 8 billion dollars in annual cost. Over the lifetime of a driver's career, typically about 60 years, the reduction would cumulate to 120,000 lives saved, one and a half million injuries less, and 480 billion dollars. All this in the lifetime of one generation of drivers. So I conclude that the overall lesser aggressiveness of women drivers contribute a tremendous benefit to society. Thank you women drivers! This should also be an encouragement for men to reduce their aggressiveness.

One of the discoveries I made by studying drivers for many years is that they like to underestimate their errors and overestimate their skills. In this sample, people rated themselves as a driver on a 10-point scale, from (1) poor to (10) excellent. Men rate themselves close to 8 while women rate themselves close to 7. This is is significant and substantial, but the interpretation is not entirely clear. It's possible that men are better drivers than women, but not necessarily. It could be that men underestimate their errors, while women are more realistic or honest. What's interesting when you look at the graph, is that this gender difference is replicated across the 10 states for which I had enough respondents to attain reliability.

When you look at the men only from these 10 States, you can see that they vary in excellence ratings of themselves. California and Colorado drivers see themselves as better than drivers from the other 8 States, especially Georgia and Michigan. It would be hard to explain these differences without further research. If you have ideas, let me know--there is an e-mail button at the bottom of this document. When you look at women only, Florida women drivers see themselves as good as Florida men drivers, but women drivers in Illinois and New York see themselves as much lower than men drivers when it comes to self-ratings of oneself as a driver.

Let's look more deeply into the driver's self-assessment. Look at the distribution of how drivers rate themselves on a 10-point scale of Excellence as a Driver:

As you can see, approximately 2 out of 3 drivers consider themselves almost perfect (10 or 9) in excellence as a driver (64%), while 1 in 3 (34%) consider themselves above average (5 to 8). This indicates to me that most drivers overlook their own mistakes and overestimate their competence. One way to examine this hypothesis is to compare the aggressiveness of the two-thirds majority of drivers who see themselves as near perfect (9 or 10 on a 10-point scale) with the one-third minority that see themselves above average and with room to improve. Here is what that looks like: self-rated Aggressiveness in relation to self-rated Excellence as a Driver

You can see the dramatic effect! The drivers who consider themselves near perfect in excellence with no room to improve (9 or 10 on a 10-point scale), also confess to significantly more aggressiveness than drivers who see themselves still improving (5 or 8 on a 10-point scale). This is an alarming result, for it shows the total lack of objectivity shown by two out of three drivers. Despite their self-confessed aggressiveness, they still insist on seeing themselves as near perfect drivers with almost no room to improve. This same phenomenon can be seen with specific forms of aggressive behaviors.

For example, if we ask the question, Who does more hostile chasing with the car, those who assess themselves as near perfect, or those who assess themselves as plenty room to improve? Look at the answer in the statistics for CHASING in relation to self-rated Excellence:

As you can see, the phenomenon is even more marked here: those who see themselves as near perfect drivers (9 or 10 on a 10-point scale), admit to twice as much chasing of another car compared to those (5 or 8 on a 10-point scale) who see themselves as less perfect (15% vs. 8%). The fact is clear: part of being an aggressive driver is to deny that you're aggressive!

This conclusion may be evidenced by this: the correlation between aggressiveness scores and excellence scores is .13, not significant. In other words, there is no relation between drivers seeing themselves as aggressive and seeing themselves as excellent. This amazing discovery is clearly shown further in this bi-variate plot shwoing the lack of relationship between the debree of self-rated Aggressiveness and the degree of self-rated Excellence as a Driver:

Note that drivers who see themselves as perfect (top 2 rows) vary with each other on whether they also see themselves as aggressive. If you think of yourself as an excellent driver, you can also think of yourself as either an aggressive driver or not. There is no relationship. To me, this is astounding because it demonstrates people's denial that aggressive driving is bad driving! And what is it that we're talking about as aggressive driving? Look at the other items on the survey: tailgating, yelling and honking at other drivers, speeding, running red lights, having fantasies of violence, illegal turns, lane hopping, and so on. So we're not talking about nothing or some mental attitude alone. These drivers do not see a connection, so they say, between these bad driving behaviors they confess they do, and how excellent a driver they can claim to be (and still be believable??).

Clearly, we're going to need more than aggressive driving legislation and aggressive law enforcement initiatives to fight aggressive driving that kills thousands a year, injures millions, and costs billions. This does not take into account the human pain and suffering to victims and families, the recovery efforts needed for a long time, and perhaps most importantly, the moral degradation of highway hostility and warfare. As a nation we pay a toll for turning on one another on highways and parking lots and shopping malls and surfing lanes. We give away our civility and give in to hostility. We feel disconnected from one another to the point of wanting to degrade, insult, and injure one another in hatred and vengeance (1,200 recorded death duels last year between drivers on highways).

The first step in any self-retraining effort is to acknowledge our problem, our inadequate performance. This acknowledgment creates the motivation to change. No change is possible without motivation. No such motivation to change exists without the acknowledgment that improvement is called for. This is where more education can bring about greater understanding and awareness of the aggressive driving problem.

Aggressive driving, in my opinion, is a behavioral addiction. It will behave like an addiction. We want to do it more and more, and, we feel incapable of stopping ourselves when we try. This is what aggressive driving is like. Before we make the acknowledgment step, we are incapable of driving in a supportive way except when there is a threatening authority present (cop car, driving inspector, insurance agent, rich grandmother or benefactor). But when we feel free, we drive according to the addictive habit--aggressively pushing our progress forward, tailgating, lane hopping, speeding, jerking the car around, driving though red, rolling down the window and screaming, cutting off to make our hurt ego feel better, and many other insanities that cost lives, money, and unitedness as a nation.

Is this act dangerous?	Percentage who say YES
Tailgating	84%
Passing on the shoulder	83
Driving through yellow lights that are turning red	73
Waiting until the last second to merge with traffic on the highway	73
Failing to yield to merging traffic	71
Changing lanes without signaling	70
Driving 10 mph or more over the speed limit	62
Cruising in the passing lane, forcing others to pass on the right	58
Making rude gestures	50
Flashing high beams at the car in front of you	54
Driving 10 mph or slower under the speed limit	42
Pulling into a parking space someone else is waiting for	39
Double parking	38
Honking the horn	26

Is this act aggressive?	Percentage who say YES

Tailgating	95%
Making rude gestures	91
Passing on the shoulder	90
Pulling into a parking space someone else is waiting for	88
Failing to yield to merging traffic	85
Flashing high beams at the car in front of you	74
Waiting until the last second to merge with traffic on the highway	66
Changing lanes without signaling	66
Driving through a yellow light that is turning red	62
Honking the horn	53
Double parking	53
Driving 10 mph or slower under the speed limit	27

TAILGATING	family/economy cars (error rate=3%)	sports cars (error rate=5%)	SUVs (error rate=5%)
Male drivers	13%	23%	18%
Female drivers	13%	20%	25%

TAILGATING	family cars (error rate=3%)	sports cars (error rate=5%)	SUVs (error rate=6%)
Young drivers (15 to 24)	9%	28%	21%
Middle aged drivers (25 to 54)	13%	13%	23%

Aggressive Driving Analyzed:
National Web Based Survey of 1,200 drivers (August, 2000)

The Effect of Age, Gender, and Type of Car Driven
Across the States

Table of Contents

Summary of Findings

Overview of the Findings thus far...

The pattern of results thus far lead me to the following conclusions:

The Second Sample:

Aggressive Driving Analyzed: National Web Based Survey of 1,200 drivers (August, 2000)

The Effect of Age, Gender, and Type of Car Driven Across the States

Table of Contents

Summary of Findings

Overview of the Findings thus far...

The pattern of results thus far lead me to the following conclusions:

The Second Sample:

Aggressive Driving Analyzed:
National Web Based Survey of 1,200 drivers (August, 2000)

The Effect of Age, Gender, and Type of Car Driven
Across the States