Report 1

Report 1
My Understanding of Driving Psychology
By Kirk Ishida

Instructions for this report are at:
www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy25/409a-g25-report1.htm
G25 Lecture Notes on Driving Psychology are at:
www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy25/409a-g25-lecture-notes.htm

Section A: Two Stages of a Driving Personality Makeover Plan

I will be talking about how driving taxonomy can be used for planning and self monitoring activities. The two stages of a driving personality makeover plan. The first stage is how to avoid being an aggressive driver at the affective level, cognitive level, and sensorimotor level. The second stage is how to be a supportive driver in the same 3 levels. A link to see this table is available at http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy25/409a-g25-lecture-notes.htm.

Before I explain what the two stages are, you need to understand what the three levels of each of the stages are. The affective level deals with your emotions as well as your feelings. The cognitive level is thinking and acting in situations. Sensorimotor level is the physical actions you do while driving. It deals with how you perceive things as well as things that you feel. All of these levels are important in the two stages of a driving personality makeover plan.

The first stage is about being aware of what you are doing that is negative affectively, cognitively, and sensorimotorly and preventing the behavior. After you are able to prevent the negative behavior you are then able to go to the second stage. This stage is quite different, in this stage instead of preventing the negative you are trying to obtain positive reactions and behaviors while driving. After these two steps you have the tools to change your driving personality to a more supportive role.

In the first stage of avoiding to be an aggressive driver I will talk about the affective level. This is how to overcome the resistance we have to change. We can overcome this by stopping or preventing stages of retaliation or anger. Tell passengers it is acceptable to make suggestions or complain about the way you are driving. Do not tease or demean other drivers on the road. Show emotions of better motives such as kindness, love and order, thoughtfulness and charity.

The next level is the cognitive level which I will discuss about rational analyses of traffic incidents. Use logic to overcome your attribution errors. Instead of always blaming the other person, evaluate the situation and see if it was your fault. Prevent or stop your self serving bias on how you viewed incidents that occur. Use more social self-regulatory sentences that you can repeat to yourself.

In the last level sensorimotor level, act more courteously when you are on the road. When you are on the road be polite and wave and smile at other drivers. Always use your turn signal and do not crowd, rush or be aggressive while driving. Always be or act as if you are in a good mood toward other drivers as well as passengers.

In the second stage of being a supportive driver I will again start with the affective level. Uphold a supportive orientation toward other drivers. Feel good for behaving amicable and feel bad for unsociable behavior or thoughts. When mistakes or errors occur and it is your fault take responsibility for those actions. Forgive other’s mistakes and errors and be grateful for advice given to you by passengers.

In the cognitive level when you are driving analysis incidents that happen objectively. Admit and identify errors that you did while driving. Evaluate your errors and bad habits and alter these things. Look at other drivers behaviors neutrally and do not assume why they did their actions.

In the sensorimotor level behave in an accommodating manner. Take pleasure from your ride and take it easy while you drive. Be cooperative with other drivers and anticipate their needs and help them. Have a nice attitude and when you can verbalize or show it.

The second stage of being a supportive driver is the change from avoiding those habits in stage one to taking pleasure in keeping away from these habits. Thinking supportively is to be objective in situations, to capitalize on safety, and reduce stress. This will help you enjoy driving again as well as making yourself a better driver and can prevent accidents from occurring.

Some ways to change your habits and become a support driver is to practice self-witnessing frequently. This can be done by doing data forms, tape recording yourself, and doing trip logs. This will not only help you want to change your habits, but it may discover new habits that you did not know of and that you can change as well. You do not only have to depend on yourself to change but also form groups to help each other improve yourselves. You can ask coworkers and friends to help improve you as well and vice versa. You can attend Quality Driving Circle groups to get motivation to improve yourself. And with recent technology you can go online and find websites or forums that people make to improve themselves and help improve others in their quest to become a supportive driver.

I described this two-staged process to my friend and she found it informative but at the same time said some of these things were common sense. She agreed that we should put this into practice because it would benefit everyone and make the road a lot safer. But she said that while she is driving some of these things were hard to do and not something that would come up immediately in her mind if incidents occur. She said she would try to do these things because it was helpful but was not entirely sure how long she would do it for.

I talked to her later and she said she thought about it more and thought it was near impossible to make this a wide spread program. The only way she felt like it was possible was to make it mandatory to everyone, but she said that was really unreasonable. Just getting the money, time, and congress interested would prove really difficult. Not only that but the general public would not agree to this because many people feel like their driving is good enough and this would be a waste of time.

Just putting these concepts into her head I think will improve her driving or at least her attitude while driving by giving her more options then just to become angry or vengeful in incidents that will occur while she drives. When she came to talk to me later I was surprised, I couldn’t believe she actually thought about it on her own time and this reassured me that some of the things I said would stick in her head.

Section B: Driving Psychology

Driving is a complex of behaviors acting together as culture norms and driving psychology is studying of the social-psychological forces that act upon drivers in traffic. It is a behavior engineering tool that is a life long process that focuses on self-improvement. Situations are looked at objectively with external and internal methods to obtain data that could be used to further our understanding of driving. Driving psychology is different from traffic psychology or applied psychology because of how driving psychology gathers data.

To first talk about driving psychology and road rage we need to realize the stressors that hinder us from driving to our best abilities these stressors are:

Immobility – While we are driving most of our body is unable to move so being physically confined leads to tension.

Constriction – When there is a lot of traffic you become anxious because you are being delayed from getting to your destination.

Regulation – We are regulated to drive by the government and just the fact that there are rules make us want to rebel and not feel controlled.

Lack of control – Because we are unable traffic and how fast we get there we start to feel stressed and take it out on other people.

Being put in danger – Is the fact that a car is worth so much money and a small scratch or bump can lead to big repair bills. There are many close calls while we are driving which leads us to angry and more stress.

Territorial – The space around our car we consider to be our territory and the fact that people invade our personal space causes us to become angry or annoyed

Diversity – There is such a diverse amount of driving styles that we cannot easily predict how someone on the road will drive which lowers our confidence and makes driving more of a challenge

Multitasking- Doing multiple things at once will make drivers inattentive which cause more delays and unhappy moods.

Denying our mistakes – When we deny our mistakes we have the “I can’t do anything wrong” attitude which is a self-righteous attitude that my make us want to punish those we see unfit to drive.

Cynicism – We develop an attitude that is over critical of other drivers because when we learned to drive people were over critical of us.

Loss of objectively – Since driving incidents always have someone at fault we tend to avoid the blame which makes us subjective

Venting – Is a cultural norm where we show our anger to temporarily reduce it.

Unpredictability – Our environment is unpredictable so it can stress when we encounter things that we do not expect or want.

Ambiguity – Because we have no way of communicating it can cause stress because we feel that other drivers don’t understand us or we do not understand them.

Undertrained in emotional intelligence - Not being trained in the affective and cognitive level causes stress because we can’t cope with some situations or copes in the wrong way.

Driving norms are important principles which are made up of the affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor as I mentioned earlier. These norms are obtained from parents, television, magazines and other people. These norms can be changed by reinforcing good behaviors and weakening bad behaviors. Sometimes self improving techniques are not enough and other methods are needed. Socio-cultural methods for example Quality Driving Circles (QDC) can be used to influence our change of behavior. Group influences can help us overcome the resistance to change our habits.

The three-step driver self-improvement program is an important principle that should be learned when you are studying driving psychology as well as while you are driving. This principle can be found in Road Rage and Aggressive Driving by Dr. Leon James and Dr. Diane Nahl. These two professors have come up with this program after researching hundreds of drivers. The program comes in three steps which are to acknowledge, witness and modify.

Acknowledge that everyone including you takes part in the aggressive driving problem. Just admitting that you have bad habits is a tough thing to do. Most of the habits we pick up driving we learn subconsciously and we continually do it. Knowing you have unpleasant driving habits which include your emotion, thoughts and overt actions will help you become a better driver. But you can’t just admit to some of your habits, because many of the habits lead to others and also intertwine with each other.

The next step is witnessing or also known as self-witnessing. You can witness or observe some overt actions in many ways including, vehicle speed, following distance, running the light, not yielding, and yelling. Some actions that are less noticeably can be your heart rate, your breathing, how you grip the steering wheel and how much pressure you put on the breaks and muttering about drivers or traffic. But to witness your emotion and thoughts you need to verbalize what you are thinking and feeling while the situation is taking place. Say anything on your mind like what you feel, what you noticed, what you want to do, and how you react. Since remembering everything may be hard you may tape record yourself so later you can behold how you act while driving.

The final step is modifying step that not only must you acknowledge and witness what your bad driving habits are you have to change them. It is easier to change your habits if you concentrate at one habit at a time, not all at once. Continually observe yourself in an objective manner and correct yourself when needed. Though people are resistant to change themselves because it is easier to be unaware of one’s habits, the actual changing of habits is what will make you a better driver.

I think one of the most important principles of driving psychology is that becoming a supportive driver is a life long process. It does not stop once you get your license or get approval to drive by yourself from your parents. Everyone needs to continually try to improve themselves as drivers for their health and safety, as well as the health and safety of everyone around them.

Driving psychology relates to many other fields in psychology. It associates with cognitive psychology because you need to know how are brain learns and reacts to situations while we are driving. It correlates to social psychology as one person driving affects many people around him and how drivers interact with each other in the road environment. It uses behavioral psychology to relate to study the behaviors of other drivers as well as the behaviors of themselves while they use self-witnessing technique. These are just a few examples of psychologies that relates to driving psychology.

Section C: Three Domains of Driving Behavior

Three domains in the lecture notes of Dr. James and Dr. Nahl http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy25/409a-g25-lecture-notes.htm#Introduction were stated in different instances. The three domains are affective, cognitive and sensorimotor. The affective is what causes emotions. The cognitive is the mental process we use to perceive things. The sensorimotor is the motor activity that pertains to the sensory.

In the first instance the three domains it is explained that we are exposed to different driving styles and by the time we do drive we have cultivated many years of aggressive driving. The three domains are hostile feelings, biased thoughts, and aggressive actions. Hostile feelings are emotions we feel when we are driving towards ourselves or other people. Biased thoughts are used in situations where we sometimes perceive that is wasn’t our fault and therefore blame others. Aggressive actions are actions taken against drivers to reprimand or punish other drivers for how they are driving or acting.

The three domains are separated into two tables, skills and errors in another case. The first domain affective skills are to use your emotions in a positive way in a situation. Cognitive skills are to perceive things and the way people act in optimistic light. Sensorimotor skills are to physically show that you are upbeat manner such as waving to another driver to say thank you. Affective errors are to want to express your emotions negatively to another person. Cognitive errors are to perceive things in negative fashion or in a way that benefits only you. Affective errors are to physically express yourself in a negative manner to other people.

Affective, cognitive and sensorimotor also incorporate driving norms. In the affective driving norms of this generation are negative and antisocial. It includes dominating and territorial as favorable driving styles. Risks and impulses are accepting socially in our society. The cognitive driving norms are that we are biased and use self-serving explanations to explain driving incidents. We misjudge the amount of risk we take when we take action and this can lead to negative consequences and driving behavior. The sensorimotor driving norm is to have negative automated habits that distract or prevent us from driving well. Though we have negative driving norms it can be changed by reinforcing good behavior and reduce bad behavior.

The three domains affect almost all of psychology due to what psychology deals with. Psychology is the study of human’s mind, brain and behavior. Affective represents the mind, it deals with how we think and react. Cognitive represents the brain, the processes needed to perceive thing. Sensorimotor is similar to behavior, it is how we physically act towards different situations. In a sense the three domains is what psychology is all about. All types of psychology deal with at least one of these domains, therefore all of psychology interacts with the domains in someway.

These three domains help me in everyday life because it makes me step back and analyze my actions. I realized that if I take an impartial view on the situation I could make superior decisions in life. For example when I get into a fight with a friend I should stop and examine how I feel, why I’m feeling like that, and what I should physically do to not make the fight worst or the relationship I have with that person.

Section D: Student Generational Reports on Driving Psychology

In the Generation 24 report by Derrick Stevens (http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leon/409as2006/stevens/stevens-409a-g24-report1.htm) he talks about his understanding of driving psychology. The 3 main principles of driving psychology to him are the three-fold self, taxonomy, and driving makeover. The three-fold self is the concepts of affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor and how it affects us. Within the three-fold self there are three levels of competence. I did not go into this concept so I will briefly explain these concepts that Derrick did go over.

The three level of competence are proficiency, safety, and responsibility. Each level of competence has a positive and negative self which serves to differentiate the actions into two groups. Proficiency is the first level where a new driver focuses on three things. He focuses on the affective self which is to be unruffled and prepared at all times. This will help the individual cope with situations dealing with stress. In the cognitive self a driver has to be attentive of his surroundings. He has to be aware of everything happening around him and be prepared to act to defeat that situation. The last self is the sensorimotor self where the driver has to coordinate all parts of his body to avoid dangerous situations as well as actual accidents.

The next level is the safety zone. In the affective self the driver will try to avoid all kinds of trouble. For example wearing his or her seatbelt and making sure that his or her car is in a good condition where it will not malfunction and cause an accident. But not only these things but also if they see a driver driving awful they will stay far away, or if they see a hostile situation incoming they will avoid it at all cost. In the cognitive self a driver needs to discern problem situations. The last stage is the sensorimotor stage where action is taken place to solve the problem.

The last level is responsibility, in the affective self the driver knows that he is responsible of not only his life but of other people as well. In the cognitive approach the driver tries to be more considerate of other people and act toward the good of the society not just for the good of himself. In the last stage, in the sensorimotor stage a driver is acting with responsibility and has positive cognition so he will be more prepared and be able to deal with hostile and hazardous situations.

Taxonomy is the inventory of habits and how the habits we have can be modified over time. Driving makeover consist of two parts, the first part is that you need to avoid being an aggressive driver. An aggressive driver is a driver driving in a way that can put other people at a risk. The last step is to become a supportive driver, realizing that your driving isn’t perfect but you are making changes to improve your driving.

In his report he stated that before he took this class he was an excellent driver and that what errors he did was overlooked by how good he usually drove. But after he took this class he realized that he made a number of mistakes and that driving psychology has heightened his awareness and he is changing his habits.

Jenine Goto from generation 23 (http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leon/409af2005/goto/goto-409a-g23-report2.htm) started off her review differently. She separated Road Rage and Aggressive Driving by Dr. James and Dr. Nahl differently by separating it in sections. Chapter 1-4 is called “The Conflict Mentality”, chapter 5-9 is “Driving Psychology”, and chapter 10-12 is “The Future of Driving”. She summarized Driving Lessons: Exploring Systems That Make Traffic Safer by Peter Rothe similarly to Jessica from the previous report. Jenine felt that Dr. James’s book helped her understand and identify her problems which in turn she could modify and change those bad habits. In the Driving Lesson book she felt that it was more about concepts and she felt that this book was drier then Dr. James’s Book.

She differentiated between drdriving.org and drivers.com. She felt that drdriving.org presented a lot of information which came with many articles linked to other pages. She felt that dr.driving.org was more personally because mail that was sent from people was answered and shown on the actual website. There were no advertisement besides more information on driving psychology from Dr. James, which made the website more professional showing that it was made just for knowledge.

Drivers.com was a more simplistic website and was easier to read. It dealt with recent public articles and a newsletter was provided if you wanted more information. This site had more advertisements for unrelated things to learning about driving psychology which made the website less professional.

Overall Jenine felt that road rage is a huge problem in society and that it will exist for many more years to come. She agrees with Dr. James that we need to instill the supportive driver idea into the younger community so that they can learn early on and hopefully prevent them from acquiring bad habits. She realizes that she herself has bad habits and will use exersize she learned to modify these habits into positive habits.

Constance DeCaires of generation 22 (http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leon/409as2005/decaires/409a-g22-report2.htm) really went into depth about each thing she felt was important in driving psychology. In many of these cases she gave examples as well as her own personally experience or thoughts. I thought this was an excellent way to present her material and think that it helped me learn about subjects that I thought I already know a lot about.

For the first question she talked about the three behavior domains the affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor. She then went into detail about the three levels, the proficiency, safety, and responsibility. Not only did she go into detail but also gave her own examples which like I mention before were helpful. She said that driving is a big problem because most of us do not understand how complex driving is. We treat it to lightly and that is why bad habits are developed and kept. What really stood out on her report for me was the exercise of negative and positive driving. It really helped clear up ideas with me as well as solidifying the ideas I had on negative and positive driving, this section I enjoyed immensely.

In generation 21 I chose Patrick Greer report (http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/409af2004/greer/409a-g21-report2.htm) because it was slightly different from other reports I saw. He had many tables which made understanding concepts easier as well as making the report easier on the eyes. He went into detail about what he thought of the website in drdriving.org as well as drivers.com. He was very objective while critiquing the websites as well as being very objective through out his paper.

He talked about the three fold self mentioning the affective self, cognitive self, and sensorimotor self. And within the three fold self mentioned the three levels proficiency, safety, and responsibility. He then went to talk about his driving behaviors as well as his driver personality makeover. He felt that the biggest problem to becoming a supportive driver is fatigue. Fatigue causes him to lean toward unsupportive decisions, which of course hinders him from doing the right thing.

Jenny Arakawa from generation 20 is the next report chose to look over (http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/409as2004/arakaki/report1.htm). She started off with what driving psychology was. She felt that driving psychology were lessons learned from the road and know that this topic was relevant to her because she herself was a driver. She then went into definitions that she thought that was important for it

The driver three-fold self was the first definition talking about the affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor self. She then talked about self-witnessing methodology. This is where you witness how you behave in situations as well as how you think and react when the situation occurs. Road rage is the acting of anger towards another driver, and that there are different kinds of road rage including verbal, epic and quiet road rage. Aggressive driving legislation creates bills to help us become better drivers by punishing us when we go against these bills. Emotional thinking is usually subjective and biased, but if we use driver emotional intelligence we can chose how we react to situations. The driver emotional spin cycle contains a positive and negative side which decides what action we will take toward a situation. Life long driver education says that we need to start teaching kids young and continue to teach them through out life.

Learning from other people’s report was quite useful to me as I began to understand more about driving psychology. It showed me points that other people valued and found important were points that I did not put much thought into. Once I read the information it not only gave me a better understanding of that idea, but made other ideas in driving psychology clearer. Seeing the information I already knew portrayed in a different matter also better my understanding of what I knew.

Section E: My Driving Personality Makeover Field Experiment

I’ve decided to make a driving personality makeover for myself to change myself from being an aggressive driver to start to become more of a supportive driver. I will be using the AWM approach which is to acknowledge that I am not a perfect driver, witness these faults, then I need to modify my behavior. I realized that though I never had serious tickets (I had one parking ticket), or gotten into any kind of accidents at all, I realized that I am not a supportive driver. From the information that I’ve obtained from this class I kept comparing myself to a supportive driver and an aggressive driver and was surprised to find that I was pretty aggressive. I realized that I often blamed others for driving incidents and that I did not always drive safely.

The first thing I did was to self witness myself while driving as well as asking passengers what bad habits or behaviors I had while I was driving. Then I analyzed the situation and thought of actions or thoughts I could have to avoid these habits:

I would speed to beat the yellow light. I would usually do this because I’m in a rush to go somewhere because I am late or just want to get there sooner. I realized that if I just left my house earlier that I wouldn’t need to speed. Also that by speeding to beat the yellow light I am making the intersection more dangerous because I might skid out of control, another car might not see me and we might get into a collision and I might get a ticket. I realized that I can’t just think of myself but I have to think that everyone has an equal right to get to their destination safely and by me speeding it might hinder them.

My passenger told me that my music is on way to loud and I realized that even though I thought it didn’t affect anyone, it actually affects everyone around me. If an ambulance or a police car is coming behind me and I don’t hear them I might hinder them from doing their job or cause an accident because they are trying to get around me. Also when the music is really loud it distracts me from being aware of my surroundings which will increase the chance of me getting into a dangerous situation. Even though music relaxes me and I think it helps me drive, it also can delay my reactions. A simple way to prevent me from doing this is to set a volume level I can play in my car and make sure that I abide by the rule I set for myself.

I realized that I don’t make complete stops at stop signs rather I just slow down considerably. Not only is it against the law not to make a complete stop but I realized that I might come into a collision with cars or pedestrians I do not see. I know that if I ever killed or seriously hurt someone because of a careless mistake I would feel guilty for the rest of my life. With that in mind every time I come to stop sign I need to remind myself that if I do not stop what can happen and how grave the situation can turn out to be.

I would become angry when drivers drove erratically and made me stop suddenly or swerve out of the way to avoid danger. I would always think that they shouldn’t be able to drive and would sometimes shout things angrily or honk my horn. But looking at the situations in an objective way I realized that they may have had an emergency and that stopped them from driving safely. I concluded that if I gave cars more space and if I was more aware of my surroundings and moved away from situations that could become dangerous I could avoid these situations. I started to grasp that I wasn’t just angry at them but I was also angry at myself from letting the situation get to this point. I was also frightened and it cause to make react irrationally.

As I self witnessed myself I realized that I had a lot of negative or apathetic emotions while driving because I was mainly thinking only about myself. I realized that I had to come up with a plan so that my first emotions wouldn’t be negative or apathetic but instead be positive or more caring. To do this I obtained a jar that I would put in one dollar for every time I performed an aggressive behavior and when I got home evaluate how I could have reacted in that situation. So by the end of the week I had thirteen dollars in the jar and found out that I often had misplaced anger at how other people cut in front of me in a dangerous way.

I put seven dollars in this way but towards the end of the week I managed to catch myself from acting anger at them and managed to instead think they had to get in the lane and didn’t know they were that close to me. I also realized that I should put more space between me and the car in front so people could get in my lane if needed which would stop this situation from occurring. Three of the dollars I put in were from people tailgating me and how they seemed oblivious to what they were doing. I realized that maybe I needed to break earlier and thus the people behind me would have more time to stop and this behavior was easily corrected when I made a conscious effort to do this.

The last three dollars I felt like I had little control over but did my best to keep my mood in an alert and supportive mood. Two dollars were from speeders at night going well over 70 mph on the highway and me getting angry at them for not following the speed limit. There wasn’t much for me to do but if I saw a speeder coming to get out of the way and instead of getting anger focus my attention back on the road so that I won’t be distracted as I am driving home.

The last dollar was from a guy who was 5 or 6 cars ahead of me wasn’t paying attention at the light and just sat there for 10 seconds and made me miss the light. I was anger that he would be so unaware of light and just sit there while he made everyone wait. But when I got home I thought about it and realized that he might had something that was important happening to him and to drive in that condition would be very dangerous. For example he might have had a baby who was eating something inappropriate or his acceleration wasn’t responding.

As I look back on my experiment I found out that just having the jar in the car made me conscious of my driving habits and that it made me want to change so I didn’t have to put money in. I avoided being an aggressive driver and found out I was acting like supportive driver a lot more frequently. I understood that to be a true supportive driver I shouldn’t need the jar but the jar made it easier to take steps to becoming a supportive driver.

Section F: Advice to Future Generations