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USE THESE LINKS TO GO TO A CERTAIN AREA IN THIS REPORT Introduction
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- Welcome to my Report 3: My Driving Persona Modification Plan. This report is about the creation of a Persona Modification Plan which is designed to elliminate a negative behavior that occurs while driving. Choosing the negative behavior I wish to change depended on some factors such as my findings of my self-observation period, the amount of negative behaviors occurring and their frequencies, and the dangers of that behavior(s). Once I determined the behavior of choice, I constructed a plan to extinguish the targeted behavior. I then executed my plan and recorded the outcome. Did my plan work? You'll soon find out.
What is Self-Observation?
- Self-Observation is when one observes their own behaviors preferrably from an objective point of view. This will enable the observer to identify a target behavior. For example, we (the students of G3), observed ourselves while driving to detect a negative behavior that we wanted to change. Once we identified the behavior of choice, we then administered a plan to try to change that behavior.
- My self-observation was a 5 day event. In these 5 days, I identified as many negative driving behaviors and their frequencies. I chose to do my self-observation during weekdays since I do most of my driving during this time. I drive two types of vehicles; a motorcycle and a car depending on where I'm going. If a route includes short distances, I use my motorcycle and my car for farther distances.
Day One: Monday
- Monday's route went as follows. At 5:30am, I drove with my car from my house which is located in the Makiki area to Hilton Hawaiian Village in Waikiki to drop-off my girlfriend at work and back home. At 8:00, I drove from my home to the university for school. As soon as I was done with school at about 12:30pm, I drove back home. At about 1:30pm, I drove from home to my workplace at Hilton Hawaiian Village. My girlfriend and I work at the same place. Finally, my last drive of the day is from work to home at about 10:15pm. This route basically remains the same for all Mondays. Listing all negative driving behaviors beginning with the most frequent and ending with the least frequent behavior; speeding, running stop signs and lights, changing lanes without signaling, boxing cars in, and swearing.
- I noticed that I sped a lot because I kept encountering yellow traffic lights and to avoid being caught by the traffic light, I sped-up. This could be example of rush according to Shane Akagi. The first speeding behavior occurred at the Keeaumoku-Wilder intersection. As I was about 20 yards from the intersection, the traffic light changed to yellow forcing me to go faster to clear the intersection. There were actually two behaviors that occurred in the sentence above, speeding and running traffic signals which are the first two behaviors listed above.
Day Two: Tuesday
- On Tuesday, I drove from my house to the university and back. Later that night, I drove from home to Queen Liliuokalani Elementary School at the corner of Waialae and Kokohead where I train and teach martial arts. Aft0er I was done training, I drove back home. Tuesdays list of negative behaviors varied a little from Mondays list. Once again, I listed the behaviors from the most occurances to the least; changing lanes without signaling, speeding, running stop signs and lights, swearing, tailgating, and calling other drivers "bad" names.
- After viewing the above list, I found an interesting coincident. On my way to martial arts training, all the behaviors occurred during that one route and in the order listed above. To illustrate, following a left turn on to Waialae at the St. Louis Heights/Waialae intersection, I changed lanes without signaling. Then I sped-up to beat the traffic light the next intersection. I wasn't the only one who was trying to beat the traffic light. There was a car on the left side of me who did the same thing. As we both cleared the intersection, a car in front of the car on the left side of me was at a stop, trying to make a left turn into an driveway between two buildings. The car beside me decides to speed up and cut right in front of me. That's when swore and began tailgating his ass calling him "bad" names that I don't care to mention at this time.
Day Three: Wednesday
- Today, my first drive was to the university from home and back. Then I drove from home to my work place and back after I was done working. As you can see, Wednesdays route is fairly short. Though this route was fairly short, I manage to do four negative behaviors. I changed lanes without signaling, sped, ran a traffic light, and tailgated a car.
Day Four: Thursday
- Today driving route was much longer than the previous days. From home, I drove to the Hawaii State Hospital in Kaneohe via the H1, Likelike, and Kahekili because I had to drop off my girlfriend at her clinicals. It was about 7:00am when I did this route. Traveling to the hospital wasn't to bad as far as time and traffic was concerned. It took me about 25 minutes to get there. But on the way back ws a different story. Traffic was terrible and it took me over an hour to get back home. It was on the way back home that I observed most of my negative behaviors which included changing lanes without signaling, speeding, tailgating, boxing in cars, thinking evil thoughts about wanting bad things to happen to the other drivers, showing the traditional "birdie" and finally running traffic signs.
- As shown above, there were a couple of new negative behaviors in evil thoughts and boxing in cars. The increase of time spent on the road is one reason I think there was an increase in behaviors. Another reason could be the distance traveled was greater than other routes or it could be the time of day this drive to place or a combination reasons.
Day Five: Friday
- Today was the last day of observation. Todays route went as follow; from home to school, back home, then to work and back home, then to the bank and then back home. Given that this route was one of my shorter ones, I thought that the results of negative behaviors would turn out like Wednesdays results. Not quite. In fact the list was identical to Fridays list which included changing lanes without signaling, speeding, tailgating, boxing in cars, thinking evil thoughts about wanting bad things to happen to the other drivers, showing the traditional "birdie" and finally running traffic signs. I forgot it was Friday and that I was in Honolulu. Being raised in Kona on the Big Island, I rarely experienced this kind of traffic.
- After observing myself driving, I was able to identify a target behavior. As most of the lists state at the end of each route, it was obvious that changing lanes without signaling was at the top of the list indicating that this driving behavior occurred more frequently compared to all the others. Therefore, I chose that behavior to change or at least attempt to change.
- I thought I didn't have any resistance to change since I've always thought that change was a good thing depending on what has to be changed. But after reading through my observations, I found that I blamed something else other than blaming myself for my negative behaviors. For example, I made a statement about how it was the traffic lights fault that made me run the stop lights. The above statement is a clear form of resistance to change. Or that it was the traffic lights fault that caused me to speed.
- Another form of resistance to change I observed occurred after Dr. James introduced this topic of modifying our driving behavior. I thought to myself soon after Dr. James spoke of this topic, "I don't need to change my driving behavior because I'm a good driver" (knock on wood). Well, I soon realized, following my self observation, that there were some flaws in my driving.
- The method I chose to use to modify my behavior is a method that I learn in a class I took in the summer of '95 from a graduate student by the name of Martin Shapiro. He taught Psy 322: Learning and Motivation. I thought this class was about teaching techniques or/and motivation techiques. Instead, it was about learning theories of how we as human beigs as well as animals learn behaviors. I learned about the types of reinforcements both negative and positive, the types of experiments researches use to test animals, and the conditioning methods researchers used to change behaviors. The method I chose to use to modify my behavior is called instrumental conditioning. Basically, instrumental conditioning is a conditioning method used to either increase or decrease a response or a behavior from occurring. For example, a response will increase if it is positively reinforced and will decrease if it is negatively reinforced. There are basically 4 types of procedures in instrumental conditioning: reward, punishment, omission,and avoidance. I used two types of procedures in my modification plan, reward and punishment. Each time I used my signal(blinker) to change lanes, I gave myself a quarter. On the other hand, each time I changed lanes without signaling, I gave a quarter to my girlfriend who always rides with me and could monitor my progress.
- I used the weekend to evaluate my driving observation so that I would be able to start immediately with the execution of my modification plan on Monday, the beginning of the week. As a reminder, the method I used was instrumental conditioning. Every time I did the negative or targated behavior, would would punish myself by giving 25 cents to my girlfriend and when I did the proper behavior of signaling before changing lanes, I took 25 from my girlfriend.
- On the first day, I had my girlfriend ride with me so she could monitor my progress. Not to my surprise, there was no progress at all. The progress was in the wrong direction. I changed lanes without signaling more frequently than the average that I recorded in my self observations. My average of executing the target behavior was 8 times per day according to my self observation. On the first day, I executed the negative behavior 11 times which cost me $2.75 and since I didn't execute the proper behavior of signaling before changing lanes, I didn't make any money. On Tuesday, the second day, I began showing signs of improvements. Instead of executing the target behavior 11 times, I tied my average at 8 times and I also executed the proper behavior twice. So it cost me only $1.50 on the second day and a two day total of $4.25. By the third day, I thought I was going to make better progress. I was wrong. I did the negative behavior 9 times and the proper behavior only once. The third day cost me $2.00. Finally, during the fourth and fifth day, I showed increased improvements. On Thursday, I did the target behavior 6 times and the proper behavior 3 times. On Friday, I did the target behavior 4 times and the proper behavior 4 times as well. All in all, the week cost me $7.00.
