The psychology of road rage.
Drinking game: Take a shot for every time I say road rage in this post.
I live in Lagos. For those who don’t, Lagos is a city with little order and rampant lawlessness. The examples of the manifestation of these uncivil characteristics are endless in a city where no one regards traffic rules or the next person plying the roads with them. Lagos is not a place where patience will take you from point A to B, even though patience is a virtue you would expect that people in the city would have, seeing as 80% of the commute time is spent sitting in stationary vehicles. Lacking patience in a city where the traffic on the roads seldom moves means that the drivers resort to creative ways of getting to their destination. Like driving on the wrong side of the road or on the section of the road dedicated to a separate form of transportation.
Ever wondered why some drivers drive like mad men? Or, if you are in Lagos, why everyone that’s not you drives like a mad person.
In Lagos, you have to share the road with an unnecessary number of okadas — these are two wheeled vehicles whose drivers drive like they are looking for death. You also have to deal with danfo drivers. Danfos are meant to be commercial buses that ply specific routes and have particular bus stops on those routes, but if you have ever seen a danfo, you know they treat the entire road as their bus stop. Then there are the tricycles popularly called keke napep, who are uncertain whether they are okadas or danfos, so they act as both. In Lagos, you have more than enough reasons to be angry. But road rage isn’t limited to just Lagos. People all over the world have road rage, and I started to wonder what it was about cars and roads that made people so angry. My hope was to find a conspiracy about how the smell of fuel hypnotized us and made us angry. I found no such thing. Instead I found boring things you already knew. So, I decided to make up stuff (I didn’t actually do that.)
A good place to start would be to define road rage.
A sudden violent anger provoked in a motorist by the actions of another driver.
Best case scenario, road rage will manifest as profanities whispered inaudibly to other drivers. At its worst, road rage leads to death. Actual accidents have occurred because one driver became really angry that another driver overtook him. Don’t believe me? Look at this video and this compilation and this news report where a woman was shot. Particularly, seeing some drivers intentionally ram into other drivers really perplexes me because absolutely nothing good can come out of that. Let’s think of the pros and cons.
Pros
1. You kill the person. That’s assuming you are really good at ramming into cars and you clip him clean at first try so his car spins out of control and epically bursts into flame like something out of Michael Bay movie. You then drive off into the horizon with a smile of content fueled by the sweet feeling of a successful revenge.
Cons
1. You kill the person. Now, you are a killer. Think about it: is that what you want? Is that really what you want? The smile disappears from your face, and now, you can never ever stop driving in your life because you are a fugitive. I personally feel like that’s too much excitement for one life.
2. You mess up your car. You fail at killing the person but you manage to gravely destroy the person’s car and, as a bonus, you also manage to greatly destroy your own car. Now you have to pay for the damages to two cars and worse, your insurance can’t cover it because you were an idiot and got only third party coverage instead of comprehensive.
3. The person records you. This is 2019. You know the person is going to record you and sell the footage to CNN and next thing you know, you’ve gone viral for the wrong reason.
I can sort of understand the intense burning sensation that would cause a person to want to ram into another car. I think the technical name for it is “ghstbshshs” because when you try to talk with this type of anger clouding your mind, you typically end up sounding like “ghstbshshs.”
At some point in time, we have all encountered this type of anger. You know those situations where someone does something extremely, ridiculously infuriating that you want them dead? You don’t? Is that just me? Oh okay. Different analogy. The anger that comes with extreme frustration, like when the tv remote isn’t working, so instead of going out to buy new batteries, you smash it against the wall. Or when your earphones get tangled up and refuse to come untangled so you decide music isn’t even that important.
Hope you get the drift. It might not feel like the same thing to you but trust me, it is. If you felt that frustration in driving situations, you might also be tempted to drive full speed into the bumper of the car in front of you.
Ever felt like everyone driving slower than you was trying to make you late and everyone driving faster than you was a maniac?
Road rage, like basically everything else in the universe, is a spectrum. The way one person experiences road rage can vary drastically from the way another person might. For clarity purposes (and because I don’t have the artistic talent to draw an actual spectrum), let’s think about it as one of two things. Personal road rage and shared road rage.
Let’s explore.
Personal road rage: This road rage stays in your car. It is your own. If there is someone else in the car with you, then you can share the anger/disgust with them. This type of road rage includes this universal hand gesture for ‘what is wrong with this one’
Generally, this manifests as you wondering what you did to deserve driving on the same road with all these other uneducated drivers. You might say that the other driver is an idiot. You don’t call them an idiot; you are fine knowing it by yourself and don’t feel the urge to inform the other person of his idiocy. You will probably share it with your passenger, saying something like ‘can you see that this one is mad?” The passenger will probably agree even though the person is unsure what you are talking about. Sometimes, you might give the driver a knowing look. From the expression on his/her face, you can tell that they know what you are thinking and they think you are an idiot too. You both agree and continue with your lives. Everyone is happy. Very civil. No noise is made. No over dramatization.
Shared road rage: Everything from using your car horn to communicate with the other driver, to overtaking a vehicle and stopping abruptly to give the driver a piece of your mind falls under this category. This is when you feel the pressing need to voice your strong feeling of disdain to the other driver. You might throw the middle finger, or ‘a waka shege fire you’
You might find yourself calling the person names like ‘oloshi’, ‘nonentity’, ‘bastard’ and the likes. In extreme situations, curses will rain upon someone’s unborn grandchildren.
In reality, most people will display some level of road rage semi regularly. It’s not worrisome because our affinity to be irrationally angry at strangers on the road stems from some innate human traits. However, these human traits defer from person to person and sometimes might cause some people to be rather more explosive than they need to be. To determine if a person’s rage is reaching dangerous levels, I have coined the graph below.
The frequency of road rage outbursts doesn’t matter as much as the type of outbursts. I know that sounds weird but it actually makes sense if you think about it. One hundred angry whispers are in no way nearly as dangerous as one ramming into a car. Being able to keep your anger to yourself shows a great level of self-control but, as you can see, my graph starts at point one not zero because as infrequent as it might be, I personally feel like at some point in time, you have to at least horn to let someone know they are being unfortunate. Where you are on the graph determines just how critical your road rage is. In fact, generally, people on the left side of the graph can’t really be regarded as suffering from road rage; they are normal people. People on the right are the ones we need to be worried about. According Dr Seth Meyers, a clinical psychologist (this name means nothing to you, doesn’t it), occasional outbursts are fine enough, but when the outbursts start to become a pattern, that is where we might have a problem.
To understand the behavioral science behind road rage, it would be helpful to examine the causative human traits that lead us to behave the way we do when driving. The human influences that affect the manifestation of road rage in people include but are not limited to stress, personality types, innate anger or hostility, vengefulness, narcissism, entitlement, competitiveness, and mood disorders.
The thought process on the road is actually very similar to the thought process you’d apply elsewhere. For instance, most people’s contempt on the road stems from feelings like ‘violation of personal space’ or ‘being cheated.’ It might not make sense but imagine you are in traffic, moving gradually like a normal person, and then some ‘maniac’ drives against traffic on the other side of the road and suddenly cuts back into your lane and gets in front of you.
Do you feel it?
Do you feel cheated?
Do you now want to stab the man?
But you are reasonable so you just insult his intelligence inaudibly to yourself.
On the road rage scale you are about here
When the influences I mentioned above start to come into play, that scale will start to look a little different. For instance, introduce a little bit of stress or a heightened level of frustration or anger in unrelated areas of life, and in that situation you might react by honking for an unnecessarily long time and to no avail because that maniac has already cut in front of you. Now, you are about here on the scale.
If we introduce entitlement and competitiveness into the mix, you’d probably act a little different. You might make it ridiculously difficult for the maniac to cut in front of you by driving wayyyy too close to the car in front of you which might inevitably lead to you hitting that car from behind. Scale position
Adding some vengefulness into the mix will mean you are probably going to drive against traffic so you can cut back in front of the guy. Dangerous levels of vengefulness mean you hit the car out of the way as it tries to enter your front.
Anger issues/ Bpd (of the intermittent explosive disorder kind) mean you might come down from your car and try to start a fight. Now we are somewhere all the way over here.
So we have established some of the human influences that determine how irrational our responses on the road are, but we haven’t spoken about the thing that makes our reaction so irrational. I mean, why do we have to act disproportionately angrier than the situation warrants for. The answer = animosity. A little like how animosity works on social media and also not so much.
Scenario: You are walking on the street and then you accidentally bump into one random guy and immediately you are about to let all of hell loose on this blind bat but then your eyes meet and you realise it’s your friend. All of a sudden, hell freezes over and you are all smiles and hugs with this person that you almost killed. This scenario demonstrates the disparity between how we react towards people we are familiar with and people we aren’t. When we have no attachment to the person, we feel less of a personal restriction to unleash our primal sense of entitlement and must therefore act disproportionately to ensure no such thing repeats itself. Makes sense essentially but it’s also somewhat barbaric. Animosity also plays a part in a different way because we feel less reserved about how we behave to someone if we never expect to encounter the person ever again. But this generally means you are still on the safe side of the road rage graph.
Increased level of stress and frustration in other areas of your life will affect the way you behave on the road. Making you more susceptible to outbursts and pushing you further to the right of the graph but as far as you don’t cross the line over to the right side you are fairly safe.
People with clinical narcissism are generally more prone to reach dangerous levels of road rage. You know how some people are better at holding their liquor than others. That type of thing. It’s not entirely their fault that they are more predisposed to acting out. They tend to have a higher sense of entitlement. Extremely competitive people are also more likely to lash out but there isn’t any strict rule to that.
Another thing that has no strict rule is how to avoid or stop your road rage. Like many human flaws (and I hope you can see how it’s unideal for you to suffer from road rage), the first step to getting over the problem is being able to identify it as a problem. Knowing that you have a disproportionately aggressive response to driving situations means that you will be more conscious of how you react in those situations. Conscious action means more proactive efforts to exercise self control. Of course, I can’t solve the problem of stress. If you are in Lagos, a lot of that stress is probably being caused by the road itself because no one deserves to spend six hours everyday commuting to and from work (to put that in perspective, it takes you six hours to fly from Lagos to London.) Psychologists and therapists typically suggests the same exercises they suggest to anger management patients to people on the right extreme of the road rage graph (because of obvious reasons.) In general, you are advised to take deep breaths and to let things go. Personally I feel like those are terrible advises. Here’s what I think you should do, instead of exerting any immediate but short-lived form of vengeance. Don’t do anything to the person that has overtaken you like a maniac. Just follow them home at a calculated distance and mark where they live. One week later, start sending them dead cats. Like just mail them dead cats. Do it once a month for a year or so. Then on the one year anniversary, attach a note to the dead cat saying ‘you are next’. Obviously, any wise person will immediately move to a new house. Follow them to the new house and give them four months to settle in and send another dead cat with a note, this time saying ‘How do you like the new place.’ Eventually the psychological torture will cause the person to kill themselves. Show up for the burial but stand apart from everyone , wear all black and hold an umbrella. When everyone leaves, put a dead cat next to the flowers with a note saying ‘you shouldn’t drive like a maniac.’
For those of you doing the drinking game and have somehow gotten this far :- road rage, road rage, road rage, road rage. Don’t drink and drive.
Thanks for reading this all the way to the end. You deserve a medal.
Plug (Cool stuff on the internet)
This week, i’d like to plug the two songs that have been stuck in my head Uyo Meyo by Teni and When the party’s over by Billie Eilish.
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