November 2018 97S TAT E
OF MIND“ A BASIC HUMAN INSTINCT KICKS
IN. YOU FEEL , ‘THIS IS UNJUST.
I CAN’T LET THIS HAPPEN’”
“The final catalyst was a guy stealing my
parking spot in Bondi, when he could see that
I’d gotten there first,” he recalls. “It was a
hugely confrontational moment. It was one of
those cases where I’d done everything right,
and this basic human instinct just kicks in
where you feel like, ‘This is unjust, I can’t
let this happen’, and off you blow. It’s a very
primal thing. When you meet someone on the
roads who’s just not playing by the rules, it
just creates this fury. This madness.”
With neither refusing to budge, Alan and
his equally empurpled adversary proceeded
to go at it to the horror of onlookers. Finally,
the other guy stormed off. But Alan wasn’t
finished. “I removed the valves from two of
his tyres so he’d be stuck there,” he says.
Lauren Shaw, from the University of
Queensland’s School of Psycholog y, did her
PhD on the social and psychological factors
that inf luence road rage. She says this idea of
“ justice” is one that seems to be at the very
root of why we lose it at the wheel.
“What my research found was that people
who responded aggressively to situations on
the road tended to have the belief that other
people were bad drivers,” Shaw explains.
“These are people who take to the road with
the expectation that people will be rude or
careless or won’t obey the rules. So what
triggered them, rather than someone actually
putting them in danger, were events that they
perceived as discourteous – ‘that person was
rude to me by cutting me off ’ or driving too
slowly. That’s the trigger, that they’ve been
unfairly treated, that it’s not just, and then
people report that their aggressive reaction
is about wanting to teach the other driver
a lesson.”
A person like this will perceive someone
tailgating them, for example, not so much
as an act of naked aggression but as an act of
rudeness, because that person is implying
that they’re driving too slowly, Shaw says. “So
they’ll slow right down, again, to teach them
a lesson.”
Remarkably, even in the cold light of
several days later, most people will perceive
that their acts of road rage were justified:
“They did something rude to me so they
deser ved it”. As if t wo wrongs somehow
actually make it all right.
Interestingly, while some drivers
described feeling immature or foolish about
their hyper-aggressive responses, they also
indicated they would be likely to repeat the
behaviour were similar circimstances to arise
in future, says Shaw, adding that research by
insurance firm AAMI found “around 50 per
cent of its members admitted to engaging
in aggressive behaviours but believing their
actions were justified”.Road To Nowhere
As you can imagine, when two people
who feel the need to teach ever yone else a
lesson encounter each other on the road,
things can spiral out of control. Shaw calls
this “escalation”, and it’s what leads to the
episodes that end up on dash-cam YouTube
channels or the evening news.
Victorian Police Assistant Commissioner
Doug Fryer finds road rage “absolutely
frightening”. “It’s a problem any time anyone
loses their cool when they’re sitting in two
tonnes of steel,” he says. “We’ve seen deaths
on our roads where people have lost their cool
and ended up killing someone. This isn’t just
shouting but ramming another vehicle.”
The Monash University study found
that as well as the majorit y of Australians
admitting to aggression on the road, 20 per
cent of people also confessed to chasing other
drivers to intimidate them.
The report’s coauthor, Amanda Stephens,
says the figures indicate that road rage is
becoming socially accepted in this country.
“It’s almost becoming part of our driving
culture,” she says.