Please visit my other site DrDriving.org for up to date articles, news analyses, survey data, interviews, and more.
Leon James
Professor of Psychology
University of Hawaii
1971-2008
Traffic psychology refers to the knowledge one acquires about how to use behavioral principles to modify one's own style of conduct in traffic situations including driving, bicycling, walking, and other forms of locomotion in shared spaces. A common activity in traffic psychology is to attempt to modify one's old driving persona to a new and better driving persona. The more you become an expert traffic psychologist the more thoroughly you can alter your traffic personality.
Traffic Psychology evolved out of the Generational Curriculum archives. Starting in 1980, many of my students at the University of Hawaii created self-witnessing lab reports on their own driving behavior by making tape recordings of their thoughts and feelings as they drove in traffic. Subsequent generations of students studying social psychology and personality theory, used these generational reports to study other people's experiences in their self-modification attempts at becoming better traffic users. For a review, see an article I wrote on the private World of the driver -- feelings, thoughts, and actions.
(1) Driving has become intolerably stressful, dangerous, demeaning. For instance: about 50,000 (fifty-thousand) deaths every year and about 3,000,000 (three million) injuries every year, year after year. As well, drivers are stressed out, threaten each other, are in a bad mood, terrorize their passengers, and often fantasize violent acts against each other. This shows there is a strong need for traffic psychology which can reverse this trend and alter our driving styles.
(2) The benefits of traffic psychology include the following:
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Stage 1 |
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Affective Level |
Cognitive Level |
Sensorimotor Level |
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Stage 2 |
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Affective Level |
Cognitive Level |
Sensorimotor Level |
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There are two perspectives possible and necessary on what people do as drivers, one external, the other, internal. The external view on driving includes road conditions and vehicle manipulation; data on these is obtainable from instruments, measurements, and observer evaluation. The internal view on driving is the perspective of the drivers themselves: their sensations, perceptions, verbalizations, thoughts, decisions, emotions, and feelings. Data on these aspects of the behavior of drivers cannot be obtained by instruments, nor by an observer. Instead, some method must be devised by which the drivers can make records of their on-going perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. This paper presents a theory of driving behavior based on self-witnessing reports made by drivers who talked out loud into a tape recorder while they were driving to and from work on their daily route.
Modern psychology is thoroughly behavioristic. It sidesteps the dualism issue by defining all human capacities as behavior. Since perceiving, thinking, and willing or feeling are recognized human capacities, they are defined as behavior. Thus, to perceive a light, or to fail to perceive it, is a behavior. Similarly, to make a decision after analyzing a situation, is a behavior. As well, to feel angry in an incident and desire revenge, is a behavior. When we consider the behavior of individuals engaged in a group activity, we can qualify the area of behavior by reference to the group activity. Thus we have specialized interests such as food behavior, smoking behavior, crime behavior, sexual behavior, and of course, driving behavior.
Since ancient times there has been agreement among philosophers that human capacities are organized into three distinct groups corresponding to the threefold human nature: the will, the understanding, and the actions of an individual. Modern psychologists also function within this threefold system of behavior. What pertains to the behavior of the will is called affective behavior and includes affections, feelings, motives, needs and everything that pertains to the goal-directedness of people's actions. For example, signaling before changing lanes is embedded in an affective context: the driver maintains the motive of avoiding driving errors. In the absence of this motive, errors are committed and the driver fails to signal. Learning to maintain the motive of avoiding driving errors is an important affective driving skill. Frequently, affective driving errors occur when conflict between motives is experienced, as when a driver is in a hurry and speeds: the feeling of wanting to be cautious and law abiding is weakened by the feeling of urge to hurry and not be too late. The theory of driving behavior must include the capacity to explain the content and organization of affective driving skills and errors.
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What pertains to the behavior of the understanding is called cognitive behavior
and includes cognitions, thoughts, reasonings and everything that pertains to
the decision-making and analyzing aspects of people's actions. For example,
signaling before changing lanes is not only embedded in an affective
(motivational) context, but in a cognitive context as well: the driver
processes information by common sense logic. Learning to make correct judgments
in routine driving incidents, is an important cognitive driving skill.
Frequently, cognitive driving errors occur when an illogical sequence of
interpretation leads to an incorrect decision: I know there is nobody behind
me, therefore I won't bother signaling this time. This erroneous decision
overlooks or ignores several reasons that should be taken into account such as:
There may be somebody in my blind spot, or There may be somebody from front
that might turn in, or There may be a policeman watching. A comprehensive
theory of driving behavior will have the capacity to identify correct and
incorrect decision-making, and specify how cognitions interact with affections
to produce overt acts.
What pertains to the individual's overt actions is called sensorimotor or psychomotor behavior and includes all experience that is mediated through sensory and motor channels. For example, signaling before changing lanes is a complex psychomotor action involving eye-hand coordination, motor readiness to apply the brakes if needed, twisting of neck to look behind, changes in breathing pattern, and less visible endocrinal and neurological changes. As well, silent or overt verbalizations may occur involving the articulatory system (e.g., "Oops, I didn't see that car!" or "Ok, now, watch out for that car"). A realistic driving theory should include the specification of the sequence of psychomotor or sensorimotor actions of drivers and how these are influenced or conditioned by the on-going affective and cognitive context.
Self-witnessing produces a protocol analysis which brings personal awareness. This awareness or new insight provides an opportunity or occasion for self-modification of one's traffic behavior from anti-social to peaceful and altruistic. UNWITNESSED DRIVING is responsible for TRAFFIC INSANITY! Unwitnessed road use is responsible for the current barbaric conditions on public roads. SELF-WITNESSING is the cure for traffic insanity. According to an international maxim: The unexamined life is not worth living . Similarly:
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The unwitnessed ride is not worth having!
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The SELF-WITNESSING TOPIC FOCUS is the method for traffic psychology. When drivers VERBALIZE what they are witnessing, as if giving a blow by blow description of what's going on in terms of their feelings, thoughts, and actions, then they are maintaining a self-witnessing focus in traffic. The act of verbalizing brings awareness of oneself as a driver. The verbalizations produce a PROTOCOL, a term related to "protocol analysis," and this transcript, whether mental or out loud, is the self-witnessing focus. SELF-AWARENESS is the result. New insights about one's DRIVING PERSONALITY and CHARACTER is brought to one's knowledge of self as a road user. The production of protocols in self-witnessing is automatic, that is, it is within the normal sociolinguistic repertoire of ordinary speakers.
Cognitively, it is part of people's HIGHER MENTAL PROCESSES or abilities. Self-witnessing produces self-awareness as a driver or road user. Self-awareness produces new knowledge about the self and thus, new reactions.
The purpose of traffic psychology is to manage these reactions in a traffic-appropriate way. To become a TRAFFIC PSYCHOLOGIST means to acquire self-management skills in self-witnessing and in self-modification of one's own traffic and road use behavior. Examples include:
Self-witnessing is a CULTURAL RESOURCE since it produces new, more civilized exchanges and mental rituals. It reveals the existence of injurious processes such as:
Self-witnessing produces NEW MENTAL FORMS -- new rituals, new ideas, new sentiments -- which facilitate their spread throughout society through MORPHIC RESONANCE (interiorly) and through MODELING (externally).
Note: The expression "MORPHIC resonance" comes from Rupert Sheldrake's postmodern proposal that new mental forms and patterns exist outside time and space and relate to each other by similarity of form. The more people re-create a particular new form, the easier it is for others to acquire it.
Every driver goes through the experience of getting habituated to the driving environment. New drivers have to concentrate hard on their driving. They are tense and often bewildered by the onrush of stimuli in traffic. If you ride with them, you notice that they frequently have to interrupt their conversation to take care of an ongoing incident such as switching lanes or making a left turn. After some weeks or months, most of us have learned to automatize our driving actions. Almost thoughtlessly we can execute complex maneuvers, weaving across lanes, turning signals on and off, making turns, passing, and so on. Meanwhile we continue the conversation uninterrupted, and there is hardly any evidence that our mind is engaged in the business of driving. We've reached the automated stage of driving.
Driving is one of the most complex tasks that ordinary American citizens are called upon to perform on a routine basis How good are we at it? There are approximately 3 million miles of highways in the nation. Every year a little over 3 million accidents are reported nationwide, which result in over 50,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of serious injuries. This works out to be about one serious accident per year for every mile of highway pavement. Is this a reasonable record or not? It's difficult to say since there are no control data. Since there are over 100 million licensed drivers in our country, and if each driver on the average travels 10,000 miles a year, then Americans drive about 1 trillion miles every year, or one thousand billion miles. This works out to only one accident for every 300,000 miles driven. This sounds pretty good. However, from an absolute perspective, it does seem that over 3 million accidents every year, and 52,000 deaths, is indeed a frightful human carnage and national tragedy that we should try to improve on if at all possible.
Does the automated driving phenomenon contribute to our driving performance? On the one hand, the Automatization of our driving habits not only saves us from stress and interrupted conversations, but also makes us safer drivers. If we stay relaxed behind the wheel and our mind is properly alert, we can rely on the body to do most of the routine decisions and acts in driving. A commentator of the national driving pattern recently characterized the American driver as "the two-second driver." He was referring to the general habit of following one another on crowded highways at such a close distance that we have two seconds at the most to avert catastrophe up ahead of us. A dramatic symptom of this highway density is the horrendous pile up phenomenon that occurs when 20, 30, or even 100 cars get involved in a single mass crash. Another less dramatic but much more frequent symptom is the driving stress we experience on a daily basis as we repeatedly slam on our brakes to avoid crashing into the car ahead of us, or watch with horror in our rear view mirror the car behind us screeching to a halt a few inches behind us. It must surely be one of the great miracles of our time that, week after week, the majority of us escape unscathed from this daily ordeal.
The automatization of our driving may be an important element in this miraculous escape. If we had to rely on our conscious attention and decision making, few of us would be able to avoid accidents. When the body takes over in driving, it manages the rapid fire, split second decision and action sequences effectively and near flawlessly. Let the body do the driving for you. It is amazingly competent. When you're driving in the left lane of a fast moving, dense cohort of cars you have no time to analyze the situation consciously. It is not unusual, for example, to travel in the left lane of the Pali Highway at 50 miles an hour sandwhiched in between two cars who are barely one car length from you. When the car ahead slams on the brakes you have less than one second to do likewise, or else...There is no time for thinking. Your leg automatically leaves the gas pedal and finds the brake pedal in a fraction of a second. Your leg knows what to do by itself. It is conditioned to the red glow of the break lights ahead of you. The lights flash and your leg responds. You don't even miss a single beat of your favorite song being played on the radio.
It's not just your leg that is thus trained. Next time you're driving notice what your eyes are doing. They constantly move, as if of themselves, systematically scanning the road ahead of you and constantly checking the rear view mirror. A good driver scans the open space ahead left and right. and checks the rear view mirror every 5 seonds. The eyes know what's going on.
The motion of vehicles in traffic is a joint function of road conditions and driver reactions. The psychological environment consists of feelings and thoughts that influence a driver's reactions to perceived events in the physical environment. This relation may be diagrammed and explored using Kurt Lewin's field theory of behavior. Self-witnessing reports of drivers who tape recorded themselves in traffic can be used as a data source for mapping their affective and cognitive environment. Recurrent structural elements are thus uncovered. Drivers automatically stick to each other and travel in cohorts and sub-cohorts. Driving alone or between cohorts is aversive. Danger zones are areas created by high risk maneuvers such as weaving or tailgating. These occur in response to predictable situations. Other psychological components observed include the 'law of least effort,' which creates reluctance to use the brakes when needed, and mental violence, which is formed to symbolic exchanges with other drivers that arouse aggressive impluses.
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AFFECTIVE |
COGNITIVE |
SENSORIMOTOR |
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Level 3 |
Affective |
Cognitive |
Sensorimotor Responsibility |
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(1) altruism and morality |
positive dramatizations
and mental health |
enjoyment and satisfaction |
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Level 2 |
AFFECTIVE SAFETY |
COGNITIVE SAFETY |
SENSORIMOTOR SAFETY |
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Affective Safety |
Cognitive Safety |
Sensorimotor Safety |
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defensive driving and
equity |
objective attributions |
polite exchanges and
calmness |
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Level 1 |
AFFECTIVE PROFICIENCY |
COGNITIVE PROFICIENCY |
SENSORIMOTOR PROFICIENCY |
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Affective Proficiency |
Cognitive Proficiency |
Sensorimotor Proficiency |
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respect for regulations
and self-control |
knowledge and awareness |
correct actions and
alertness |
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The numbering scheme in the taxonomy follows this pattern
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Level 3 |
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AFFECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY+A3 (7) Altruism and Morality
vs. LACK OF AFFECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY-A3 (16) Egotism and Deficient Conscience
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COGNITIVE RESPONSIBILITY+C3 (8) Positive Dramatizations and Mental Health
vs. LACK OF COGNITIVE RESPONSIBILITY-C3 (17) Negative Dramatizations and Madness
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SENSORIMOTOR RESPONSIBILITY+S3 (9) Enjoyment and Satisfaction
vs. LACK OF SENSORIMOTOR RESPONSIBILITY-S3 (18) Stress and Depression
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Level 2 |
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AFFECTIVE SAFETY+A2 (4) Defensiveness and Fairness or Equity
vs. LACK OF AFFECTIVE SAFETY-A2 (13) Aggressiveness and Opportunism
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COGNITIVE SAFETY+C2 (5) Objective Attributions
vs. LACK OF COGNITIVE SAFETY-C2 (14) Subjective Attributions
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SENSORIMOTOR SAFETY+S2 (6) Polite Exchanges and Calmness
vs. LACK OF SENSORIMOTOR SAFETY-S2 (15) Rude Exchanges and Overreaction
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Level 1 |
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AFFECTIVE PROFICIENCY+A1 (1) Respect for Regulations and Self-Confidence
vs. LACK OF AFFECTIVE PROFICIENCY-A1 (10) Disrespect for Authority and Lack of Self-Confidence
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COGNITIVE PROFICIENCY+C1 (2) Knowledge and Awareness
vs. LACK OF COGNITIVE PROFICIENCY-C1 (11) Untrained and Faulty Thinking
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SENSORIMOTOR PROFICIENCY+S1 (7) Correct Actions and Alertness
vs. LACK OF SENSORIMOTOR PROFICIENCY-S1 (16) Faulty Actions and Inattention
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Please visit my other site
DrDriving.org
for up to date articles, news analyses, surveys, interviews, and more.
Bibliography of Driver Behavior and Driving
Socio-Cultural Methods of Managing Driving Behavior in Society
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RoadRageous
For Interviews, DrDriving's Congressional Testimony
Media Interviews with DrDriving |