Road Rage Linked To Automobile Bumper Stickers

Ponca City, We Love You sends news of a study by Colorado State University psychologist William Szlemko that recorded whether people had added seat covers, bumper stickers, special paint jobs, stereos, or plastic dashboard toys to their cars. Szlemko found a link between road rage and the number of personalized items on or in people's vehicles. "The number of territory markers predicted road rage better than vehicle value, condition, or any of the things that we normally associate with aggressive driving,' says Szlemko. What's more, only the number of bumper stickers, and not their content, predicted road rage... Szlemko suggests that this territoriality may encourage road rage because drivers are simultaneously in a private space (their car) and a public one (the road). 'We think they are forgetting that the public road is not theirs, and are exhibiting territorial behavior that normally would only be acceptable in personal space,' the researcher says.

in other news

tasteless people behave in tasteless manner. still no cure for cancer though.

Re:in other news

I think I saw that phrase on a bumper sticker....

Not hard

This problem's not hard,
And for societal win,
To irresponsible retard:
A safe, simple Schwinn
Burma Shave

No stickers in the UK

Here in the UK you rarely see bumper stickers, yet road rage is not exactly rare. So I don't really see the correlation. Having said that, whenever I see the Jesus fish on the back of a car, I do want to run it off the road on general principle. But maybe that's just me.

Re:No stickers in the UK

It's not the fish, it's the driving style.

They pull out in front of you, drive at <speed limit> - 5 mph, and wonder why you're driving up their sanctimonious arse honking and flashing!

Bastards, the lot of them.

And they always double park on a Sunday when they get their weekly dose of self-flagellation.

Did Jesus say 'Pick up thy bed and drive'? I think not :P

Re:No stickers in the UK

It doesn't say love thy neighbour to me, it's says I'm better than you, you stinking infidel.

Re:No stickers in the UK

don't think it *is* that bad. The worst frequent offense is tailgating, which I deal with by slowly reducing my speed until people get tired of tailgating a sloth, and overtake. At which point I accelerate, overtake *them*, and put some reasonable distance between our cars. I occasionally have to rinse and repeat, but the majority of people get the hint.

You do realise that what you're doing is qualified as "road rage", don't you? At least a light form. You're trying to teach them a lesson, by annoying them even more.

Seen

Don't drive as if you own the road ... Drive as if you own the car.

Very helpful

This is very helpful information. Now I'll know which vehicles my wife should keep the gun trained on.

Makes me wish I had a bumper

as a cyclist I lack opportunities for such displays of wit(I guess I could use my backpack), but if I did, it would have to read:

"The size of ones genitals is inversely proportional to the size of ones vehicle"

The best part is that SUV drivers would run out of fuel before they could even catch up!

i always wonder about people

who have a psychotic need to display their politics so aggressively

i'm talking about the people with 4-5 bumper stickers, all stridently ideological

of course you are entitled to be proud of your beliefs, but if you are radioactively evangelical about them, then i am 100% certain that your mind is completely closed and your brain dead hack partisanship is total

on the other hand, you can be assured no one will want to borrow or steal your car... although these bumper sticker hordes are usually stuck on a 15 year old rust eaten subcompact

Ixthus + Volvo badge

Ixthus fish and a Volvo badge: that combination is my number one worry when I'm out on a bike.

yeah, but did they study ...

Did they study the effects of going 45 in a 55?

Did they study the effects of drifting along and not passing while in the passing lane on a limited access highway (a 2 point ticket, called disrupting the flow of traffic, in most states)?

I mean, really, if you did these things on foot you'd get, "Um, excuse me" and "right behindja," and "sorry there, ah, commin through."

The real source of road rage is not being able to say, "excuse me." It frustrates humans because we need to be able to express ourselves. We're pack animals and the cars isolate us.

My hunch is that inconsiderate behavior is a better predictor than bumper stickers. I haven't done a study though. Could be wrong. (Ignore my sig it's a joke.)

Re:yeah, but did they study ...

The real source of road rage is not being able to say, "excuse me." It frustrates humans because we need to be able to express ourselves.

Several years ago, I read of a study that looked into this and there conclusion was the same as yours.

You can sort of test this yourself while walking. While walking down the street, step in front of another pedestrian (cut them off) and then keep walking, you'll hear negative comments. Do the same thing, but then apologize and the person you cut off will act like it was their fault.

Re:what about the obvious ?

Bubelah, part of the point of the article is that this was a correlation they weren't expecting to find. That's what science is. You collect data based on a rough idea of where you should look and only when you've looked at the data do you start finalizing your conclusions on what you're looking at.

Re:what about the obvious ?

That's right. The phrase 'linked to' in the title is a dead giveaway. Otherwise the submitter would have used 'caused by'.

Re:what about the obvious ?

Perhaps they need to define the data better then. does bumpersticker already on the car or placed on it by someone else count or is it just bumper stickers that the person who is driving it placed on the car?

I also have a severe problem with the definition of road rage too. A while back, I had my 4 year old nephew in the car and some jack ass thought that the speed limit (45, on a 2 lane residential area) was too slow and passed me on the double yellow line going around a curve. At the time I noticed him over taking me another car was coming around the corner and he shot back into my lane forcing me to slam on the brakes and run onto the shoulder in order to avoid an accident. Well, that cause me to fish tail a little but the car remained under control and no accident occurred.

Up the road, was an intersection with a 4 way stop. I jumped out of the car and proceeded to ask him what the hell was going on and we started arguing when I told him how to drive and where to pull he head from. A cop was sitting at the cross intersection and turn on his lights and all. He was saying I was having a problem with road rage when he was radioing in for backup. About that time, a car came up behind us and the driver walked up to talk to the cop. I was handcuffed and told to stand by my car. The car going to other direction thought I actually had an accident and turned around for fear of being hit with a leaving the scene of an accident. When he saw us talking to the cop, he gave them his side of events and the cop had me write a statement then let me go. I assume they cited the other guy. But I was going to be hit with some road rage charge for telling a person who almost killed me (and my nephew) to watch what the hell they were doing. Had that third car not turned around, I would have been screwed and another meaningless state for this meaningless result in this study.

I'm confident that the parent was correct in his assessment of the usefulness of this study and results. Not necessarily because they did something wrong, but with the inherent flaws in the data collection itself. To me, road rage is aggressive driving but evidently, it can be a number of things depending on who writes it up and so on. And the question of some kids putting bumper stickers on a car verses the current owner willfully doing it is skewing things a bit too.

Re:what about the obvious ?

Well, the secret is to learn defensive driving - if someone is overtaking you in a dangerous spot, you lift off and slow down in anticipation of the accident / intemperate manoeuvre from the idiot overtaker.

It works for me - I never, ever have road rage (though I do swear at cyclists a lot).

Re:what about the obvious ?

Bullshit. You obviously have all your "science" education from high school or some engineering college. Only certain fields in physics and chemistry rely on controlled experiments or even have the possibility to do them.

These researchers found a correlation, and made a further testable (falsifiable) hypothesis based on it. That's science. Only idiots who tag stories like this with correlationisnotcausation think science is causation studies. It's not.

Re:We'll see what later studies show.

I'm not a psychologist, but I don't think I'd let a study done with that methodology through peer review. It's way too susceptible to confirmation bias on the part of the police. Traffic cameras would be much better.

Re:Nice

I wonder if we could get them to do a study on slashdot rage...I think that I've noticed that people with sigs tend to fly off the handle more often than those without them.

Re:Other people's stickers?

You key a car the same way you unlock it...

except you miss.

Re:Other people's stickers?

I walk past a car at my work's parking lot that has Bush stickers all over it. I have fantasies about keying the holy living shit out of that car as I pass it.

Well, that about sums it up, doesn't it? Your actual desire, when someone else expresses their opinion, is to be violent. My desire, when I see a car loaded up with "random acts of beauty," "peace happens," and "war is not the answer" stickers is to actually talk to the platitude-dealing pollyanna involved and get a sense of how they think, for exmaple, that their random acts of beauty and kindness might change a local Taliban franchise's boss into someone who no longer likes to kill women showing up to work as a teacher and showing young girls how to read. How was "war not the answer" when Germany was rolling over Europe? How exactly was peace going to "happen" in the Balkans as Muslims were being ethnically "cleansed" from their villages with Serbian machine guns?

Unlike you, whose first instinct - however well reigned in for fear of being caught - is to vandalize the property of someone you hate, I'm more inclined to either roll my eyes, or actually communicate. I do appreciate your so nicely illustrating the shrill, tantrum-like thought process that drives so much of the politics on the left. It's entirely about rudderless emotions, drama, and cheap, sophomoric, fair-weather outrage that's anything but constructive... and shows that the pretense of disliking partisanship is completely disengenuous. It's true of you, and it's true of the current presidential candidate from the left. Hot air. It's not about getting anything done, it's entirely about how much you don't like someone else. "Change We Can Believe In" is the most empty bit of meaningless rhetoric I've ever heard, since it avoids, at all costs, any actual specificity lest the people that utter it get caught showing the real foundation of their idealogy. No need to of course, since the portrait you painted of how your brain works when exposed to nothing more than the name of a political opponent handily demonstrates the actual nature of most political thinking on the left: it's about actual hate, or about craven pandering to that hate as a way to power.

Re:Other people's stickers?

More often than not, it seems it's the tolerant, freedom loving liberal activists that vandalize and destroy other people's property.

Indeed. Nothing says "peace" and "harmony" and "can't we all just get along" like smashing the windows of a local retail shop during your anti-war rally, and burning giant puppet effigies to show what you'd really do to people you hate if you could get away with it. Yes, hate is tolerated and even encouraged, as long as it's in the name of warm, fuzzy, friendly political correctness anchored in leftist, populist platitudes. Why these idiots - so often theoretically college educated - can't see the fantastic irony of hating in the name of tolerance, and being randomly violent in the name of peace, I'll never know. Unless it's because, most of the time, they're just muddle-headed poseurs with no critical thinking skills and they're actually attending protests to get dates, shock their parents, and come up with something new for MySpace because people are getting tired of just looking at pictures of them being drunk at parties.

Re:Other people's stickers?

those damn revolutionary traitors dumping all that tea just to make a point

I see, because the local coffee shop is an agent of foreign colonial tyrrany, being run in a country in which you have no representative democracy or constitional checks and balances. Yes, nothing has changed since the founding of our nation! We must still destroy the property and livelihoods of our neighbors in order to show how we must sever ties with the overseas monarchy that sets taxes on which we have no voice, stations troops in our homes, and prevents us from manufacturing goods on our own shores. Yes, I see now that you have a keen grasp on it.