The Mind Behind The Wheel

Psychodynamics Of High-Risk Drivers

Road rage is a misleading term for pathological violence while driving. Rage is rage, anywhere. violence while driving. We enjoy our new crush-cage cars with air-bags. But they cannot protect us from ourselves. And each of us, sometimes, is a danger to ourselves and to others, especially while we are driving. Some of the danger is preventable by high-level driver training, but that training is not offered in ordinary driving schools, nor is it affordable in the defensive driving schools that do address it.

All drivers are a bit preoccupied some of the time. It is rare to see a driver totally focused who is commuting in traffic. Professional drivers like ambulance, police and fire-truck drivers responding to a call, and race-car drivers, and some accident-wise and wary motor-cycle riders tend to keep their attention more focused on the act of driving.

The rest of us, who are not professional drivers, relax, listen to music or talk shows, talk on cell-phones (rarely using speaker-phones), talk to passengers, consult the tiny print on the GPS or map. Some eat, brush hair, put on makeup, shave, and even read the newspaper. We discipline the kids in the back seat, argue with our spouse in the passenger seat, or search on the floor of the car for dropped cigarettes. Often without realizing it, we daydream.

Have you ever arrived at a destination and realized that you could not remember the route you used to get there? Have you ever driven beyond your destination without noticing? How many times have you missed seeing someone on a crosswalk, plowed through a red-light, or scraped an island curbing with your tire? Have you ever been suddenly very angry after a minor fender-bender? Have you just driven while so tired that you fell asleep at the wheel for even a second or two? Did you then do the smart thing and pull off the road and nap or did you vow to stay awake and drive on, nodding off again and again, hoping to stay awake long enough to get home alive?

We may be literally bored to death by the experience of driving (and in this context, boredom can really be lethal). Trying to stay awake in a dangerous situation is stress doubled. The sounds and movement of steady slow traffic (or lack of it) may lull us into near-slumber. In this sleepy state we are unprepared to notice change in the road environment, and it may come at us point blank when the car ahead of us suddenly slows for a cat. After a close call we remember for a few adrenalized moments that our lives depend upon our ability to maintain concentration. If this description fits you, you are not alone. All the other drivers out there behave in the same ways or worse than you can imagine. Everyone has stories like this to tell.

In any mile of nighttime traffic there are likely to be some whose driving ability is dangerously altered impaired. They may be cognitively and emotionally impaired by alcohol, prescription drugs, illegal drugs, sleep deprivation, even by low blood sugar, by near blindness, or age related dementia. Yes, they are all on the road together—with you and you are sometimes one of them.

Their concentration might be distracted by their cell-phone use, their radio or music device. Passengers and pets distract drivers. When one of these incapacitated or preoccupied drivers is surprised by an unexpected event we discover that he or she is also emotionally unstable, at least for a few furious moments. That is where and when the anger flares. What is going on in our mind while we are behind the wheel?

Under stress a drivers universe shrinks. The accumulating stress of long journeys, heavy traffic or ‘running late’ reduces the drivers mental world into an isolated solipsism locked within the mind.

No matter how drivers may claim that driving is relaxing, and that they enjoy it, good driving requires so much concentration and presents so many potentially life threatening encounters, that in order to relax and enjoy driving, most drivers have learned to suppress and displace their anxiety.

But if stress is the driver’s daemon, we should recognize that and learn how to become aware of our reactions while under stress. The mind behind the wheel is nearly always under stress. Drivers are kept busy making complex determinations of distance, velocity, the conformation of the road, estimated time of arrival and the positions and abilities of other drivers. It is hard to imagine that any mind-space remains with which to chat on a cell-phone, talk to a friend in the next seat, or to relax. The tasks of controlling the vehicle at speed over an unpredictable course, would tax the most sophisticated computer that now can be fit in any car.

While experienced drivers claim that driving has become “second nature” this kind of common language blinds us to achieving any fuller understanding of what driving involves, and just how, and how much, it taxes us psychologically. If driving is second nature, then we probably ought to remember that our first nature is an animal nature.

We humans are animal creatures that have evolved as the top predators on the planet. The survival-related behaviors of a predatory species involve violence, and these violent capabilities are ever-present, genetically installed in our brains, ready for action within each of us.

When under extreme stress or perceived threat, we will fight if we cannot take flight. Even high predators had predators during our evolution, so it is also true that even dominant predators like ourselves the responses of prey species in our genetic history and current makeup. Over evolutionary time our physically smaller ancestors to had to survive the vulnerable period of infancy and childhood, were more exposed within their natural environment, and were smaller and a lot less muscular and agile than the many predator species that considered them a delicacy.

We still carry these inherited fear and defensiveness responses along with our own predatory behaviors within us as we drive our new hybrid cars. On the road we may react to our fear or other sudden events, to almost any unexpected stimulus, by fleeing and speeding beyond our driving ability. We may shout threats and make intimidating gestures, or use our cars as weapons in an actual attack. Fighting, once it starts, tends to elicit or generate escalating levels of violence. Once fear has become threat, and threat has degenerated into an attack, fighting tends to become increasingly violent because now two drivers are both frightened and angry. If there are angry passengers in the cars, the fighting may become even more dangerous. Other drivers become dehumanized in the enraged tunnel vision of the fighters. If you are one of the onlookers then you may know how hard it is to resist your own fear and anger at having been cut-off or nearly killed by one of the fighting pair. Drivers who cannot resist those impulses may become involved in a brawl.

Even in the absence of a near miss event, some people drive in constant fear, and in consequence drive and act unpredictably. Others may be angry when the first get behind the wheel for reasons that have nothing to do with the road. They may drive impulsively and eventually violently. An angry or enraged person who is misguided enough to be driving an automobile is driving a heavy weapon. Any car, especially large cars or pickup trucks have great mass, and in a high velocity impact may produce as much damage as a small bomb. This is casually termed an ‘accident’.

The term “Road rage” has become a pop-psychology and media buzzword that hides from us the real psychodynamic that causes dangerous rage to erupt while driving and cause an ‘accident’.

If we accept the term “road rage” at face value, we tend to believe that the rage relates directly to the road and to the driver. We seem to believe that “road rage” is therefore unique to the road environment, and occurs only to the crazy-seeming odd individuals who exhibit road rage behavior. These assumptions leave us without any real and useful understanding of the actual phenomena, nor help us learn how to deal more safely with enraged drivers. These kind of unexamined beliefs will also close off the most valuable avenues of inquiry that could lead us to important discoveries regarding the psychodynamics and sociodynamics that produce violent driving.

Road rage is a misnomer. A term that tends to misdirect our thought process and leave us believing, uncritically, that the anger and rage that we may feel on the road is caused by the road and particularly by other drivers. Seen more simply, and I think more accurately, some people are angry or enraged before they even get into their car. People just happen to be driving while angry.

A more rational approach is to examine violent driving behavior and it’s determinants, and learn how to prevent rage from being unleashed against other drivers on the road, and against the police officers who must intervene and control this behavior.

Police and public, both, must learn how not to become enraged drivers and how to avoid becoming the victims of enraged drivers. “Road rage” does not exist as a separate entity in the human psychological spectrum, but anger and rage can occur while people are driving as happens in any human environment. We bring the anger with us, it is part of our personal history and our particular ‘character’. Everyone is capable of anger. It is a reasonable response to fear and pain. It is unreasonable for us to allow ourselves to become reflexively murderously enraged because we are terrified and socially isolated within the steel body of a car.

Inasmuch as the anger and rage of drivers differs from other anger and rage only by the arbitrary context (the roadway) and the instrument of emotional expression (the automobile), It is considered here as a special case of a much larger, general theory of violence, currently in manuscript form in my work.

This special case of anger and rage on the roadways, and the research categories it subsumes, may collectively be termed violent driving. From within this perspective, anger is far more common and hazardous than rage. And both are more common in the work and domestic environments than on the roadways. Also, viewed from this perspective, anger is far more common and is really more hazardous to many drivers than the less frequently occurring murderous rage that may severely affect only a few people. There is much to learn and much we may do to curb these problems and their consequences for us all.

Because of public information campaigns, we all know about the dangers inherent in driving while drunk, and the police, the courts, and public are making some progress towards reducing this menace. We are not well-informed about the dangers of driving while angry or driving while enraged, even though these behaviors are more frequent and perhaps more menacing.

Further compounding the problem is that both drunk driving and driving while angry may often coincide in the same individuals frequent and repeated behavior, and that these individuals may be driving drunk because they are angry and in pain, or attempting, unsuccessfully to anesthetize their pain by drinking and or using other drugs, more than doubling the trouble. Or they may be driving while suicidal.

Driving while intoxicated can be regarded as a symptom that becomes a contagious disease when it (literally) impacts other drivers. The expression of ordinary anger is part of every life. Angry, enraged, violent driving behavior is not ‘ordinary’ it is pathological. It is equivalent to running screaming through a crowded mall waving a high powered rifle firing random shots. The angry driver may direct this kind of anger nihilistically at him or her self, while also directing it outward towards strangers. Surely during any episode of violent driving the enraged driver has no thought of self-preservation.

Real road accidents and ‘accidents’ seriously injure or kill huge numbers of people each year. So this is not a trivial problem. It is a great public health and public education problem for the whole country. To solve it, even to approach it, we must attempt to understand what is for many scientists, researchers and administrators an unpopular and uncomfortable subject— psychodynamics. We need to grasp the central ideas of psychodynamics, and apply that understanding to the behavior and environment of the American driver.

Knowing all this we aught to get into our cars with great caution, because what has become for most of us an ordinary trip to the market could, and often does, kill someone. Driving is a complex job and we do not do it well. We do not even recognize just how challenging and complex it is.

Driving is tiring. I cannot think of another task that I do while seated that tires me as much as driving in two hours of bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic. Two hours of that and I am exhausted. Two hours of reading, writing, thinking, talking to friends, or patting my cat while watching a movie do not have the same effect. Judging from the drawn faces of other drivers, and from the anecdotal complaints and reports of people who commute daily in high-demand driving conditions, my experience Is typical.

If we had never invented automobiles, and were a society of joggers, we would be safer. We would be complaining about many more sprained ankles and bad knees, but we would not need air-bags to stay alive, nor would emergency rooms fill with victims of walking accidents or require the kinds of war-wound trauma emergency care that is routine today. But we do drive, and I am attempting to point out how terribly dangerous the roads will continue to be if we do not comprehend and better manage our own state of mind while behind the wheel.

How can we learn to do this more safely? Driving is a complex system of interrelated forces and dynamics. If we are ever to improve our safety while in a car, we must understand drivers and their behaviors in terms of their roles in this system, and understand the role of psychodynamics within the system’s dynamic interactions as a whole.

In future papers on this weblog I will attempt to explore the psychology of the driver in more detail. I hope to be able to illuminate why we become so dangerous while we drive, and what research and public education opportunities might bring us closer to making us safer drivers.

Cars amplify ordinary anger. What might have been merely an offended glance and gesture of apology on a crowded sidewalk can become a duel to the death on the road.