Speaking of Psychology - Road rage, traffic jams and why driving stresses us out, with Dwight Hennessy, PhD

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

Is your commute the most stressful part of your day? Traffic psychologist Dwight Hennessy, PhD, talks about what’s going on when we get behind the wheel -- including what causes “road rage,” why some people find driving more stressful than others and how our personality affects our driving, what’s going on with the “zipper merge,” and how driving may change with more automated and self-driving cars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Now, Hank has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365Copilot.com slash work. Is your commute the most stressful part of your day? Does your blood pressure rise when you get behind the wheel? Or do you think of your car as a welcome retreat where you can listen to your music and podcasts in peace? Many of us drive every day, but we rarely stop to think about how driving affects our moods, our emotions, and the rest of our lives.

And conversely, how our emotions and our personality influence are driving. Today we're going to talk to a traffic psychologist about what's going on, when we get behind the wheel. Why do some people find driving more stressful than others? What causes road rage? And how can you defuse a tense traffic situation? How will driving change with the rise of more automated or even self-driving cars? And how can psychological research help make the roads a safer and more pleasant place for us all?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association, that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Dwight Hennessy, a professor and chair of the psychology department at Buffalo State University. His research interests include driver stress and aggression, how to encourage safe driving, and how driving stress spills over into everyday life. He's the author of numerous research papers and editor of two books,

Traffic Psychology and International Perspective, and contemporary issues in road user behavior and traffic safety. He's been interviewed about traffic and driver behavior by media outlets, including the New York Times, the CBC, and the Seattle Times. Dr. Hennessey, thank you for joining me today. Well, I'm happy to be here with you today. Let's start with a question I posed in the introduction. Is driving inherently stressful for most people?

And if so, why is that? What makes driving stressful? Yeah, overall, I would say that, driving is stressful for just about everybody who drives in some way. It's an interesting topic because there's no shortage of stories. People are intimately involved in their commutes and it's something that impacts so much of our lives that until something happens, we often don't really stop and reflect. But the traffic environment really is full of these everyday stressors that on their own might seem mundane, but they tend to accumulate. And most people have a commute that requires them to

spend a considerable amount of time on the road, especially in bigger cities. So the more we do this, the more it piles up. And we just have these expectations about what other people are supposed to be doing. So not only do we have stressors that come from the situation itself, but also in our transactions and interactions with other people. How do you define road, rage and how is it different from aggressive driving? Yeah, that's a that's a big question in our discipline. There's different ideas about those. Road rage is usually referred to as the major things, like the really dramatic, violent kinds of actions, whereas we tend to talk about driver aggression as maybe the more, quote, mild things that happen where, you know, road rage might be

something like a physical altercation where somebody gets out. They tend to be more dramatic. The outcomes tend to be more severe, whereas aggression might be seemingly more trivial, although I will argue that those seemingly trivial things often escalate and they pile up and they pile up, but, you know, honking a horn at somebody, yelling, shooting the fingers, things like that. So when I say mild, they don't necessarily mean that these are things that we shouldn't be concerned about. But I think in people's everyday conversations, that's how they differentiate. But there is a, there's also a challenge that we have in our discipline when we talk about the term, quote, aggressive driving. Because there's a big confound that happens there in everyday language

where people include things that aggression researchers wouldn't consider as aggression. So things like speeding and weaving, those are illegal. In many cases, they are dangerous in some ways. But in a more technical sense, we don't consider them as aggressive. They're not aggression. They're not an intentionally harmful action. Where the average person then takes this into their everyday conversation, makes it challenging for us as researchers because they will

talk about, for example, my neighbors are really aggressive driver. And what they mean is they drive fast. Whereas I'm thinking about an aggressive driver as somebody who routinely does things that is intended to harm somebody, like tailgating them or swerving in front of them and hitting their brake, like a break check, or the more violent things that you asked about in this question. So that makes it really hard for us because you try to tell people these are the things that are related to aggressive driving and what they think is speeding rather than harmful actions. But that seems like a very fine line. I mean, if somebody is, you know, riding up on my tail because I'm not going fast enough. I mean, yeah, it's aggressive. It's right on the precipice, I think, of road rage. I mean, how do you measure it if the line is blurry? And that's one of the big obstacles for us as scientists in this area. And I think that's an obstacle for all aggressive researchers to find that fine line that you're talking about and how do we identify it.

So if we take horn honking, for example, I think this is the prime example of it. Horn honking also has a symbolic function in many cultures. If I'm at a light and it turns green and not paying attention, somebody else, might just lightly tap the horn as a signal. Do I interpret that as aggressive? That's a different conversation, right? Oftentimes that's what happens for people, that they, as the recipient of that,

see that as something malicious. But as a scientist, can we differentiate when it's a small tap versus when it's a long leaning on the horn or a frequent engagement of that horn? So it's hard. in the bigger picture to find where that dividing line is for you that might be different than that dividing line that's for me. I think there's a stereotype that men tend to be more aggressive drivers and possibly engage more in road rage than women. Is that borne out by the research?

For the most part, yeah, I think that especially when you get into the more extreme acts of aggression and violence. But I will say that over the years that I've been doing this, that gap has narrowed considerably. And I think we do have to watch out for the same stereotypes that exist in our culture about aggression in general, that there's a myth that women are unaggressive or less aggressive in some ways. But when you look at different versions of aggression, just in general, you'll find that there are some areas where women are more aggressive than men, relational aggression, for example, or as aggressive as men in, say, verbal types of things. And something similar emerges in the traffic environment as well. It depends on a lot of

different factors, but there are times where there are women who are just as, if not more aggressive than men. Well, I understand that you have found differences between men and women and how they extend their personal space when they're driving. Could you explain what you found in that arena? Yeah, personal space is a, that's another one of these tough topics because by its very nature, it's invisible and how do you identify it? And so one of the things we've tried to do is rather than find an actual boundary that exists, we've tried to really tap into the subjective nature of that and ask people about their preference for it. And one of the things about personal space is, one of its functions is protective. And in some ways we've found over the years and other people,

I think, have borne this out that for whatever reason, men tend to be more defensive of that space, more defensive of the vehicle. Some people have argued that maybe, there's more of an investment personally in mask quote masculinity and ownership of vehicles and and and and and and that type of concept again I think a lot of that gap is narrowing um men tend to drive more than women do as well so that exaggerates the the the thought and the feeling about the defensiveness and and this I mean that's part of safety right when you drive more there's just a greater level of risk over time and and I don't I don't think It's an enormous difference.

So, again, these are all on average. And this is a point I try to make routinely when I talk in my courses. Remember, we talk about differences that we're talking on average. There are some women that are very defensive of space and some men that are not defensive of space at all. What's the impact, if any, of the type of car that a person is driving? I know there's stereotype that if you happen to have a red sports car that the cops are going to pull you over more often for speeding and what, you know, they call some

cars, muscle cars, which sort of gives you the impression that, you know, there's something very aggressive going on in that vehicle. Is there any truth to that sense? I mean, I've heard those things over the years. I don't think there's a lot of evidence that bears witness to, like, a red car, for example, as you say, other than could a red car be more easily detected at certain times? Maybe. I've heard that suggestion. But again, I don't know if there's a lot of data to match that. But I will say that when you talk about things like getting tickets and getting pulled over, et cetera, like any area of police sciences, are there times when police may have stereotypes? And you use the term muscle car. Are there some cars or there's some vehicles that

maybe are more easily identified or maybe more stereotypically associated with driving fast? probably and there are certain vehicles that maybe certain individuals might be more inclined to gravitate towards but does that mean that they always drive faster? Does that mean that they're always going to be centered out? Possibly not. But and I think that starts to get into that bigger picture idea that we talk about of this interaction between the individual who they are in general and who. who they become in the traffic environment.

So, there are two different concepts, but, you know, they interact very well that the way people are in life does translate to who they are when they drive, not exclusively. So is a certain type of person more likely to gravitate towards a faster car, a bigger car, a more powerful car? Yeah. Does that mean that they drive that way? In some ways, yes. Now, I'm originally from New York, and I still drive when I go there. And my sense is that New Yorkers, at least those who live in New York City, are more aggressive than the people I generally drive around in the D.C. area. And it's also my impression that drivers in Boston are less inclined to follow the rules. Like, they don't stop at stop signs. They don't care about the lanes in the road. And I'm just wondering whether my impressions are borne out by data or if I'm just like really

have these stereotypes in my brain are, but are drivers in some geographic locations more or less aggressive or more or less likely to adhere to the traffic laws? As a simple general statement, yes, I think there is something to that. It's part of understanding the culture and subculture of driving. So in some ways, we have traffic laws and those traffic laws, I mean, there are some of them that are pretty much standard wherever you go. But people also tend to develop their own unwritten rules depending on where they are. Because in some ways, and even when you think about how teenagers learn to drive, in many ways, they've been learning to drive for a long time. So my kids learned how to drive from me sitting in the back when they

were young. And so they picked up on my habits. They picked up on the way I deal with particular situations. It's no different than any other avenue of life in parenting. Well, the same thing happens when you're driving in a particular area. You kind of learn those things that are acceptable and unacceptable in that particular area. And this is actually one of the things that drew me into this sub-discipline. I'd never heard of it before, but as a social and environmental psychologist, I'm keenly interested in social factors on how we share those with each other. And so I moved from a fairly small city growing up, and I moved to graduate school in a large city. And I was taken by how I changed as a driver in very short order. My patterns of driving changed, my thoughts about

driving changed, and I became in some ways more, quote, aggressive, more assertive because I had to be. because my very first day, the light turned yellow, and I was looking to turn, and I stopped, and I had vehicles behind me leaning on their horn, like, visibly angry with me because I come to learn very, very quickly after that, that when the light turned red, multiple vehicles still go through, and I wasn't accustomed to that. And so if I was going to, quote, survive in that driving environment, I had to adapt and I had to adjust to those unwritten rules of the road. How do we learn that? There's no book.

I didn't show up in this city first day and it's like, all right, here's your driving manual for driving in this city. I had to learn it firsthand. And so we share the culture of driving in those particular areas. So does that mean that people in urban areas may be more aggressive drivers because you have to be to survive? In some ways that that is possible. although I've been in some rural areas where people in different ways drive in a very assertive way. I've been on long stretches of rural road. In fact, I just witnessed, I experienced this fairly recently in another country where I'm driving on a rural road and a vehicle comes up just flying behind me.

And I hadn't really learned, I guess, those unwritten rules of the road where I was driving a little over the speed limit to that. I was driving a little bit over the speed limit. They were driving a lot over the speed limit and they just blew past me. So, you know, I could take offense to that. But I just took that as, all right, that's what they do here. So it happens in all environments, but I think your assessment is fairly accurate that in that environment where there's more vehicles and there's there's more interaction. You have to learn that pretty quickly and you have to adjust. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill,

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Now, I used to live on a suburban street in northern Virginia where people drove too fast. And we did tests and some of us started a campaign to get the State Department of Transportation, which managed the roads there to implement measures to slow people down. And they started this whole battle in the neighborhood of speed humps or speed bumps, which are not the same thing I learned. Other people wanted flashing signs telling you. you, what your speed was as you drove past. And ultimately, all the state did was paint some new lines that made it look as though the road was narrower than it actually was, which didn't

really have any impact at all. So I'm wondering, what are proven methods that can slow people down? Yeah, there are definitely calming, traffic calming measures that do work. It's just they don't work for everybody. So the signs that have the speed on them. Well, you hear anecdotal stories of people who are like, oh, I'm going to see how fast I'm going, right? Let's see if I can break my record or something like that. Or there are people who will drive over speed bumps or speed humps at the same speed. They just don't really care about their vehicle. But I think for the most part, and this is just my general take over the years, I think most people want to drive safely. We develop bad habits sometimes. And again, where we're driving like other people do in that particular location or

for me, what we found, one of the biggest things that contributes to driver stress and driver anger and driver regression is time urgency. And I think that is another thing that leads to increased unsafe driving, that we're just in a hurry. We've got to get somewhere 10, minutes ago. And so we push those boundaries of safety. And there's an acceptable level of risk that we're willing to take all of us. Like just like let's put the cards on the table about this. Driving is not safe. It's dangerous. We dichotomize safety. It makes us feel better to think about things as being safe. So I wear my safety belt. I've got all these airbags so I'm safe. But you're not. Bad things can still happen to you. But we don't, we don't, we don't.

like to think about that attitudinally because it makes us uncomfortable. But what happens sometimes is when we think about something as being safe now that we have all these safety features, we start to take fewer precautions. But what we really should be talking about is what are the things that make it safeer? That's what traffic safety people are doing. They're trying to make it as safe as possible while still understanding that it's an unsafe environment. and it's an unsafe action. So I think in some ways, we've got some of these measures, like speed pumps really do work.

Sometimes the reflectors or the little, you know, the bumps in the road to kind of tell you you're veering off the lanes. Those kinds of things work for the average person who really wants to tame down their safety. We talk about three E's in traffic research. There's enforcement. That gets people to slow down. put a cop on the side of the road, put up speed cameras and stuff like that, although people adapt to them,

people adjust to them, people share information about where you can find them. So enforcement can work, although it doesn't always work. One of the things that comes up about speeding is sometimes people who make more money than the average person, maybe a speeding ticket's not that big of a deal for them. Some countries have gone to a floating system where you pay a proportion or you pay a higher level if you make more money so that it cuts into your pocket a little bit more. So there's enforcement. There's engineering, which is kind of what we're talking about. Can you make the road safer? Can you put these things in place? Like roundabouts. Roundabouts really, once you get used to them, some people have a hard time figuring them out at first. But once you've got them down,

they really can calm traffic. So can we engineer it? Yes, we can. But education is also part of it. And that's a big hurdle. How do you convince somebody to drive more safely when they've already convinced themselves that they are already driving safely? That's hard to do.

But those three together, I think, are a good approach to helping to increase the safety or make it safer. So you mentioned a lot of the automated features that are in cars. today. And we haven't even talked about, say, backup cameras or the warning signals when you're leaving your lane and so forth. Does this make people better drivers or do they become more complacent? Yeah, I think it depends on what you mean by better. Because there are some theories out there borne out by data that when you add more safety features, sometimes people then start to take more risk because they shift that boundary at which they now feel they really should take

precautions. But are they beneficial to have those kinds of features? Absolutely. So I'm never, so please, nobody interpret me saying that these are bad, that we have these safety features. But can people start to lose concentration a little bit more because they rely on the technology to quote save them, perhaps. But I know I will admit to being guilty of this that, I mean, see, nobody can keep a perfect path and track while they're driving. Have my features told me, hey, wait a second. Look out.

Absolutely. And I thank my safety features profusely for that. I mean, so they are wonderful. But could it lead somebody to the point where they're not. paying attention as much as they possibly should because, and I won't say which person in my family is guilty of this, but can you hit something backing up with a backup camera? Yes. So it's, yeah, they're not foolproof, right? I've done it. Yeah. The number one safety feature is still that driver, not the vehicle itself. It's the driver and the vehicle together that is going to

make this safer. What about self-driving cars? I mean, how do you develop a self-driving car where people will sit there and kind of give up control or do they have to have a little bit of control to feel comfortable? And how does the car make decisions around whether, you know, do I hit that abutment or do I run into that child? Yeah, that is a hot topic in the area of autonomous vehicles. And I personally don't do research on that. I know people who do. There's a huge ethical consideration in that area, not just even just the engineering part of it, the design, but also the bigger picture. I don't have an answer for you of like what happens in that situation where it's hit one or hit another. But I do know that there are some people who are

still uneasy about autonomous vehicles. One, for those kinds of reasons, because accidents, collisions still do happen with vehicles that are full of safety features like that. And there are other people, as you mentioned, who don't want to pursue autonomous vehicles because they love driving. I'm not one of those people. I do not love driving. So as a traffic researcher, I hate driving. And if I have to drive in a simulator one more time, I'm going to lose my mind. But I know people who love, love driving. And I honestly can't see them really wanting to give up full control. So part of the conversation in that area is at some point in the future when autonomous

vehicles are everywhere, I guess. I don't know what that future is. But do you allow people to take control? Do you still allow vehicles that don't have autonomous control? So that's a challenging conversation in that area of research because some people would love to have it full autonomous because I think the assumption is that it is full safety. But again, it's not full safety. Maybe safer, but not full safety. There were news articles during and just after the pandemic about how COVID lockdowns made driver behavior worse. Did that actually happen? Is there data to show that?

Yes and no. I mean, during COVID, when there weren't a whole lot of vehicles on the road, there were plenty of media reports of people doing just absolutely crazy things on the road, like driving 180 kilometers an hour on a 100 kilometer an hour road. I mean, that's an insane speed because there's no other vehicles around. I think people were pushing the boundaries. but I think the average person didn't drive because of the lockdown. And after the lockdown, did people forget how to drive? Like, I had a reporter contact me and asked me about, like, did people forget everything?

Like, people didn't forget how to drive. That skill base was still there. But I think in some ways, what happened is perhaps people forgot some of that transactional stuff. Maybe they forgot just how frustrating it was. perhaps they forgot how stressful some of the things were. And I think immediately after, there is some evidence where people just found it intolerable in some ways, where they had a return of stress that they hadn't had in a long time. And so for them, perceptually, they just saw that as this over-the-top thing,

that there was this return of something that was so noxious for them that they had, to try to do something to recover from it. So you did hear, especially anecdotally, stories of people like, there's so many people out there honking at me. There are so many people tailgating me. There's so many people cutting me off. So again, I don't think it's that they forgot how to drive. It's just that there's this maybe rebound thing where it's just suddenly so new again. And in a magnitude that they had forgotten happened in their regular commutes. So I have to talk to you about the zipper merge. I know you've done some media interviews over the years about that. And I'm wondering, first of all, what's a zipper merge and why do people find them so stressful and controversial?

In its simplest form, zipper merges, if you have two lanes that are supposed to come together as one lane, legitimately, it's probably not so much for a regular disappearing lane. They often talk about it in construction zones and things like that, where you typically have two lanes that have to become one lane. So the zipper is, each lane should take a turn. And in concept, you want people to stay in both lanes. And that actually helps the traffic move more quickly, rather than somebody a mile and a half down the road trying to force their way and just, just, you know, they see that there's that sign that says, oh, the right lane ends. And so they panic and they try to get over and they jam their way in. And what it does is it forces the

people in that other lane to slam on their brakes or whatever and then they get ticked off. But again, in concept, if you stay in the two lanes and then everybody just takes a turn, it really runs smoothly and both of those lanes move fairly quickly. The reason why people hate it and there are people who really push back on this. And you can go on YouTube and there are people who will do little videos about how they block that jerk in that other lane from from getting in see people don't recognize that if they zipper it flows really well and they don't want somebody taking that space and like look i stayed in this lane and you're trying to break the rules yeah right so they see it as rule breaking even though it's

not rule breaking so i think people just not used to do it and i think they're so accustomed to that that pattern of, I followed the rule, you didn't, you should suffer, not me. And if you cut in front of me, that means I take longer to get to my location. And so you're slowing me down further. And it creates frustration. It creates anger. And now somebody's trying to force their way in. And one of the reasons why people try to get over earlier is because they don't want to face that interaction, that uncomfortable interaction. of trying to get in and nobody will let them in and they get stuck there on that, that island, right?

That disappearing lane island where you might, I don't know, you have your mail forwarded you could be there so long. Now, you were quoted in a recent New York Times article about noise cameras, these noise sensitive cameras that are supposed to catch and ticket people for excessive honking, which is illegal in New York City, I know. Why do people honk when they don't need to? think that noise cameras could be an effective way to get them to stop? Yeah. Why do people do stuff in traffic when they, when they, when they shouldn't?

If I had the answer for that, I'd have a hundred books. Yeah, that honestly, that that really is one of the things that the social psychologist in me is still captivated by. Why do people do what they shouldn't do. And again, I think a lot of this comes back to the culture part. The reason why somewhere like New York City has so much honging is because people do it. I know that sounds oversimplified, but that really is. People honk because people honk. And it becomes an acceptable thing. And if there's no real consequence for it, so that the noise cameras are, I think it can be effective. But in order for something to be effective as a, quote, punishment for something, it has to be perceived as real. And if it's not being used and if it's not being really enforced, then it just doesn't enter people's consciousness as a reason to stop.

And horn honking really is one of these things that we've adapted in that traffic environment for expressing our frustration. We want to release it. and if somebody honks at you, then you honk back. It really does have a potential, though, to escalate to something much more dramatic because oftentimes these more extreme, quote, road rage things are the violent things often start with something simple like being honked at or somebody cutting into the lane in a zipper merge where they shouldn't have. Because it all becomes perceptual.

People get upset that other people are doing things that they don't want them to do where they feel threatened or they feel aroused or they feel anger and they've got to express it some way. So horn honking can be an expression of aggression and it's fairly universal in some ways. Again, I just came back from another country where there's good bit of horn honking where people do it to signal, but people also do it as that expression of, you know, we're in an environment, we're in that vehicle and they can't see us. And while in some ways we talk about that as escalating the aggression potential. In another way, when you think about it, if you're in a supermarket lane and somebody cuts in front of you, they can see your angry expression. They can see that

they've made you upset. But in the traffic environment, they can't. And so we really need that other person to know that we're upset. And the most convenient way to do that is honk the horn. I mean, we could lean out the car and yell at them, but I'm sure that happens. Some of us do. that too. You know, not to dwell on New York particularly, but there's been controversy there because they've been trying to agree around limiting how much traffic can be in sort of the core part of the city and charging people, escalating amounts of money to drive in those areas. And that's created a great deal of controversy in the city. They were going to implement it and then the governor pulled back, how effective are programs like that where you really limit whether people can drive in the core

part of a big city? Yeah, and there is precedent in other big, big cities. But again, I'll go back to something is only effective as enforcement if it's perceived as real. So unless there is a mechanism where somebody's going to prevent or penalize people for breaking that rule, then there will be rule breakers. So what's on the horizon? What are some of the, what are the next big research questions that you want to answer? A lot of my more current thoughts really revolve around this personal space issue. I think it's a part of who we are as drivers that we don't really talk about a lot,

these unseen things that we transport with us. I mean, I've done a lot in terms of how we care. things from other environments. And our personal space is something that's always there with us. But it varies and it's adaptable to different environments. And again, this is one of the things that's really captivated me about the traffic environment is that people generally don't think about how impactful it is on their lives. You've got to get to work somehow. You've got to get home somehow. And we accept that there's kind of this spillover. And you mentioned spillover earlier.

There's this spillover that happens between work and home. And so if you have a really bad day at home, you bring it to work. If you have a really bad day at work, you bring it home. But people forget that you've got to get to those other environments somehow. We have personal space at work. And I think people will recognize that that, you know, if I'm sitting in my desk and somebody comes too close to me, then I might do something to protect myself from that. And maybe in the workplace environment, it's fairly easy to just kind of back off or something like that. Or you visualize that so that they can see.

But in the traffic environment, you can't see the person. And there's much more at stake in violating that personal space. So I think there's a greater potential for us to be defensive of that space. But people generally don't use that language. In fact, traffic researchers generally don't use that language and don't talk about this. idea of bringing our personal space, that bubble of safety, if you will, into the traffic environment. So I would love to see more conversation within my discipline about that. And it's impact on the things that I do research on, which of course are most important, right? Because

those are the things I'm interested in is how it impacts our stress, how it impacts our aggression, because those are some of the things that we do find are being transported into the next environment, how it influences your work performance and your work mood and your work interactions and your home life. Well, Dr. Hennessy, I want to thank you for joining me today. This has been really interesting. Yeah, I'm glad to be part of this. I am always happy to talk about traffic. It's something that I think about a lot. And I think it's something that a lot of people are really keenly interested in. And I love being able to put that scientific spin on that conversation. So thanks for having me.

You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www. www. speakingof psychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at Speaking of Psychology at APA.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Winerman. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week.

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