What makes drivers tick?

YOU are driving on the road when someone decides to cut into your lane and drive below the speed limit. What would you do? Start tailgating, beep the horn or yell out abuse and make rude gestures?

We have all been guilty of or have witnessed aggressive driving. The issue has driven a team of researchers to look into what makes us tick on the road and how it is affecting our mental and physical health.

University of New South Wales psychology lecturer Dr Tom Denson and his team are in the early stages of a three-year research project into aggressive and risky driving behaviours. Denson’s research is being carried out in partnership with AAMI, an insurance provider which recently released its annual road safety index, revealing that 86% of motorists surveyed felt drivers were becoming more aggressive.

Denson says road rage has been found to be more common amongst younger drivers, but everyone is capable of being aggressive in the car.

“When people experience road rage, they may not only be a danger to others, but also to themselves,” he says. “Anger increases blood pressure and heart rate, which prepares the body for action, what psychologists call a physiological fight response. In our hunter-gatherer past, anger was probably a pretty effective means of scaring off enemies, facilitating aggression and obtaining resources but in today’s modern world frequent anger is a risk factor for early mortality due to cardiovascular disease, and in the car it can lead to accidents.”

The AAMI index revealed that 50% of drivers surveyed had verbally abused another motorist for doing something they felt was rude or dangerous, while 82% felt it was justified. Some 23% of drivers surveyed said an aggressive driver they had had a run in with had followed them, 10% had been forced off the road, while 2% had been physically assaulted.

“With an alarming number of Australian motorists admitting to experiencing road rage, my colleagues and I are concerned about mental and physical health ramifications,” Denson says.

To find out what effects aggressive driving and road rage have on motorists, Denson and his team have created a state-of the-art-driving simulator, which has high-graphic wraparound screens that display driving conditions. While in the simulator, participants in the research are exposed to pre-scripted triggers designed to evoke anger. “What we have done is program various triggers that typically annoy people on the road. For instance, people will cut you off, or someone will overtake you and drive really slow, so things that really annoy them,” Denson says.

Denson says the individuals involved with the research are hooked up to various monitoring devices that gauge their heart rate and sweat at their fingertips. The research team is also using an electromyography to monitor subtle facial muscle movements, which can detect someone’s mood. During this initial stage of the research, participants sit in the simulator as they would in a normal vehicle and are exposed to three conditions. The first condition is with no music, the second with aggressive music and third with the same aggressive song but without the lyrics. This is to find out if the environment in the vehicle has an effect on how drivers react to situations on the road.

Denson and his team then expose the individual to various triggers, which annoy people on the road and monitor which of the three environmental conditions set off road rage. “We get measures of how close they were tailgating, swerving and how close they get to the slower driver before they react and overtake,” he says.

The next stream of the research will involve inducing anger in the laboratory and monitoring how individuals behave and react on the road, Denson says. People who have a bad day at work or an argument are exposed to the common triggers that annoy people on the road and could have a heightened reaction.

A spokesperson from the Office of Road Safety says the way we drive is a reflection of the way we live – too fast. “Making quick aggressive decisions on the road won’t benefit you [the driver] or anyone else,” the spokesperson told SL. “We need to be more forgiving in the way we drive and remember that for a safe system [on the road] to be fully effective, the responsibility regarding road trauma is a shared one.”

Recently, the office launched a speed campaign called Enjoy the Ride, which embodied the cultural shift required for drivers to eliminate rushing, speeding, inattentiveness and possible aggression, in order to improve road safety. “Simply, drivers should heed the messages within the campaign and really enjoy the task of driving, being in the car and not being tempted to react aggressively as this won’t achieve anything and will increase their risk of a crash.”

Meanwhile, earlier this year the federal government released the National Road Safety Strategy, aimed at reducing the country’s road toll by at least 30% by 2020. “The National Road Safety Strategy provides a comprehensive plan to reduce trauma on Australian roads,” Infrastructure and Transport Minister Anthony Albanese said.

“With road crashes killing about 1400 people each year, and seriously injuring 32,000, we must do more to change the way we think and respond to the road safety challenge.”

As part of the strategy, all governments have agreed to implement a number of actions based on a safety system approach aimed at achieving safe roads, speed, vehicles and people.