Bad Drivers Don't Think They're Bad: What Twitter Tells Us About Road Rage

It's always the other driver's fault.

Even though the data suggest that the behaviors in which a small subset of drivers engage, like speeding, show up repeatedly in accident statistics.

Which means that data aren't yet solving the emotional problems involved. JL

Jonathan Gitlin reports in ars technica:

Hashtags on a set of  81,000 road rage tweets provides an illuminating look of our fellow drivers. The number one thing that enrages them? Complaints about other cars' speed made up more than half of all tweets that criticized a specific behavior, with fewer than one percent of those being complaints about people driving too fast. The Twitter data suggests that many people view other people with contempt
Driving a car is risky business. It's true that deaths on our roads continue to decrease over time. But it's a good thing our cars are getting safer because it looks like we're crashing them more often. In 2014, more than 2.3 million people were injured on the roads in the US, a slight bump from the year before. In total, vehicle crashes actually increased by almost eight percent compared to 2013.
That's because people continue to do stupid things behind the wheel, like Snapchatting their top speed. In fact, drivers who repeatedly engage in dangerous behavior while driving—drinking, speeding, tweeting, etc.—are over-represented in car crashes, suggesting that there's a minority of irresponsible people out there who are a menace behind the wheel. Researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada have attempted to discern why these subsets of risky drivers continue to misbehave.Dunning-Kruger study today: The uninformed aren't as doomed as the Web suggests.

The research, published in PLOS ONE, suggests this trend might be a classic case of Dunning-Kruger in action. Or in the words of lead author Thomas Brown, "surprisingly, these drivers usually don't consider themselves as risk takers. If drivers don't believe they are risky, they will not accept the need to change. On the other hand, if we and they don't understand their behavior, how can they be expected to change it effectively?"
The study compared three different groups of risky drivers with a control group. The risky drivers were placed in subgroups of those who had repeated drunk-driving convictions (called DWI), those with repeated driving violations not linked to alcohol (speed), and a third group with both (mixed), based on their responses to questionnaires about previous substance use, driving history, and past criminal behavior.
Tests in a driving simulator showed that these risky drivers sped more often than the control group. The "speed" and "mixed" groups both tested higher for sensation-seeking, and all three groups of risky drivers had an altered cortisol response to stress (a higher baseline level of cortisol and lower amounts post-stress).
The paper suggests that the need for thrill-seeking behavior "may represent an attempt to reacquire hedonic homeostasis via stimulation of nucleus accumbens dopamine release." In other words, "my brain made me drive like an idiot."
It may well be that those unsafe drivers are a hazard to us in more ways than just the obvious. Another paper, this one published in Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behavior, uses an analysis of 13-months' worth of road rage-filled tweets to explore what kinds of situations cause people to forget that the right thing to do after being cut up in traffic is not "whip out the phone and tweet angrily."
Researcher Amanda Stephens and her colleagues searched a number of hashtags to narrow in on a set of almost 81,000 road rage tweets. The data provides an illuminating look inside the minds of some of our fellow drivers. They have opinions about the people they share the road with, and they want to make those opinions known. The number one thing that enrages them? Other drivers are too slow.A new study attempts to determine just how neurobiology is being used in court.

Complaints about other cars' speed made up more than half of all tweets that criticized a specific behavior, with fewer than one percent of those being complaints about people driving too fast. General complaining about other drivers was the next largest category, followed by improper lane use or not merging properly.
The Twitter data suggests that many people view other people with a certain measure of contempt—as annoyances who don't deserve to drive on the same roads. What's troubling is their reaction. Research has shown that even receiving a notification on your phone is a distraction. Is being angry with another driver really a good reason to whip out your phone to tweet about it?