Topics on Music and Driving from the Rothe Textbook

As I flip the pages of the book Challenging the Old Order written by J. Peter Rothe, I couldn't find anything on How Music Affects Our Driving. So, I decided to just look for informations about drivers that I can fuse together with the effect of music in driving. I thought the subject on the difference between young male drivers and adult male drivers can also be related to how music affects drivers. Rothe compared young male drivers to adult male drivers on page 9, and here's what he said:

Young men represent a group with less experience in both driving and drinking than the older population.

Young men are also more likely to be driving at night than older people.

Young men are also represented disproportionately high in the studies of drinking-driving.

I believe, Mr. Rothe should have included the statistics on how many young male drivers get into an accident because of the music they listen to or how high the volume of the music they're listening to. There is definitely a distinction between the type of music a young male driver listens to as opposed to the type of music an older man listens to. And there's definitely different effects it has on them and the way they drive.

There are times when I see a bunch of teenagers listening to a rock music with a volume that's so loud, that everybody next to them can hear it. Not only that, they go with the beat, banging their heads up and down, not paying so much attention to the traffic. I bet you, they can't even hear if an ambulance or a cop is coming. Adult male drivers, listen to rock music too but not as loud as when young male drivers listen to it. Usually, older men (ages 21-up) don't listen to heavy metal music, only the semi-heavy metal types so there's still a difference. This could have been an interesting topic if only Mr. Rothe had taken "the effect of music to drivers" in consideration. But, I guess, a lot of people hasn't really thought about it yet -- that music can affect the way a person drives.

Here's an interesting point that J. Peter Rothe brought up about Differences:

Differences in thought processes and differences in the perception of traffic accident events lead to differences in the knowledge people possess about traffic. Drivers behave according to their recipe book of traffic knowledge. Part of the recipe book includes typical processes of reasoning about events that is a prelude to behavior.

I thought that's pretty interesting about what he said on drivers having a recipe book of traffic knowledge because there's really no such thing as a specific recipe. Like in cooking, we follow the recipe but sometimes we add other things that were not specified in the recipe book. So, who's to say that we can't assume that music has an effect on the way we drive? Some may say it has no effect, but some may think it has -- it's all up to what your recipe book of traffic knowledge informs you.