In traffic, first impressions are usually the only impressions. Unlike the bar in Cheers, traffic is a place where no one knows your name. Anonymity in traffic acts as a powerful drug, with several curious side effects. On the one hand, because we feel that no one is watching, or that no one we know will see us, the inside of the car itself becomes a useful place for self-expression. This may explain why surveys have shown that most people, given the choice, desire a minimum commute of at least twenty minutes. Drivers desire this solitary “me time”—to sing, to feel like a teenager again, to be temporarily free from the constricted roles of work and home. One study found that the car was a favored place for people to cry about something (“grieving while driving”). Then there’s the “nose-pick factor,” a term used by researchers who install cameras inside of cars to study drivers. They report that after only a short time, drivers will “forget the camera” and begin to do all sorts of things, including nasal probing.
The flip side of anonymity, as the classic situationist psychological studies of Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram have shown, is that it encourages aggression. In a well-known 1969 study, Zimbardo found that hooded subjects were willing to administer twice the level of electric shock to others than those not wearing hoods. Similarly, this is why hooded hostages are more likely to be killed than those without hoods, and why firing-squad victims are blindfolded or faced backward—not for their sake, but to make them look less human to the executioners. Take away human identity and human contact and we act inhuman. When the situation changes, we change.
This is not so different in traffic. Instead of a hood, we have the climate-controlled enclosure of the car. Why not cut that driver off? You do not know them and will likely never see them again. Why not speed through this neighborhood? You don’t live here. In one study, researchers planted a car at an intersection ahead of a series of various convertibles, and had the blocking car intentionally not move after the light changed to green. They then measured how quickly the driver behind the plant vehicle honked, how many times they honked, and how long each honk was. Drivers with the top down took longer to honk, honked fewer times, and honked for shorter durations than did the more anonymous drivers with the tops up. It could have been that the people who put their tops down were in a better mood to begin with, but the results suggest that anonymity increases aggressiveness.
Being in traffic is like being in an online chat room under a pseudonym. Freed from our own identity and surrounded by others known only by their “screen names” (in traffic, license plates), the chat room becomes a place where the normal constraints of life are left behind. Psychologists have called this the “online disinhibition effect.” As with being inside the car, we may feel that, cloaked in electronic anonymity, we can at last be ourselves. The playing field has been leveled, all are equal, and the individual swells with exaggerated self-importance. As long as we’re not doing anything illegal, all is fair game. This also means, unfortunately, that there is little incentive to engage in normal social pleasantries. And so the language is harsh, rude, and abbreviated. One faces no consequences for one’s speech: Chat room visitors aren’t speaking face-to-face, and do not even have to linger after making a negative comment. They can “flame” someone and sign off. Or give someone the finger and leave them behind a cloud of exhaust.
Are You Lookin’ at Me? Eye Contact, Stereotypes, and Social Interaction on the Road
GEORGE: This guy’s giving me the stare-ahead.
JERRY: The stare-ahead. I hate that. I use it all the time.
GEORGE: Look at me! I am man! I am you!
—Seinfeld
The movie Crash opens with the voice of the narrator, a driver in Los Angeles, speaking over a scene of a collision. “In L.A., nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.” The statement is absurd, but not without truth. Sometimes, we do come across little moments of humanity in traffic, and the effect is powerful. A classic case you have no doubt experienced is when you are trying to change lanes. You catch someone’s eye, they let you in, and you wave back, flushed with human warmth. Now, why did that feel so special? Is it just because traffic life is usually so anonymous, or is something else going on?
Jay Phelan, an evolutionary biologist who works a few buildings over from Jack Katz at UCLA, often thinks about traffic as he pilots his motorcycle through Los Angeles. “We evolved in a world in which there were about a hundred people in the group you were in,” he says. “Every person you saw you had an ongoing relationship with.” Was that person good to you? Did they return the spear they borrowed last week? This way of getting along is called “reciprocal altruism.” You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours; we each do it because we think it will benefit us “down the road.” What happens in traffic, Phelan explains, is that even though we may be driving around Los Angeles with hundreds of thousands of anonymous others, in our ancient brains we are Fred Flintstones (albeit not driving with our feet), still inhabiting our little prehistoric village. “So when someone does something nice for you on the road, you’re processing it like, ‘Wow, I’ve got an ally now.’ The brain encodes it as the beginning of a long-term reciprocal relationship.”
When someone does something good or something bad, Phelan suggests, we keep score in our heads—even though the chances are infinitely small that we will ever see that person again. But our big brains, which are said to have evolved to help manage relatively large social networks, might be getting a powerful signal from that encounter. So we get angrier than we really should over minor traffic slights, or feel much better than we should after moments of politeness. “I feel like that happens a lot on the road,” says Phelan. “Somebody waves you over to get in the turn lane. I get these unjustified warm feelings about the world, that there’s kindness in it and everybody’s looking out for each other.” Or someone cuts you off, and the world is a dark, nasty place. In theory, neither should matter all that much, but we seem to react strongly either way.
These moments seem like traffic versions of the “ultimatum game,” an experiment used by social scientists that seems to reveal an inherent desire for reciprocal fairness in humans. In the game, one person is given a sum of money and an instruction to share it with another person as they see fit. If the second person accepts the offer, both keep their share; if he or she rejects it, neither gets anything. Researchers have found that people will routinely reject offers that are less than 50 percent, even though this means they walk away with nothing. The cost is less important than the sense of fairness, or perhaps the bad feeling of being on the “losing end.” (One study showed that people who did more rejecting had higher testosterone levels, which probably also explains why I tend to get more worked up about people who cut me off than my wife does.)
This sense of fairness might cause us to do things in traffic like aggressively tailgate someone who has done the same to us. We do this despite the costs to our own safety (we might crash, they might be homicidal) and the fact that we will never see the person we are punishing again. In small towns, it makes sense to be polite in traffic: You might actually see the person again. They might be related to you. They might learn not to do that to you again. But on the highway or in large cities, it is a puzzle why drivers try to help or hurt each other; those other drivers are not related to you (or even an immediate threat to your “kinship group”), and you are not likely to ever see those other drivers again. Have we been fooled into thinking our altruistic gesture might be returned, or are we just inherently nice? This traffic behavior is simply one part of the larger puzzle of why humans—who, unlike ants, are not all brothers and sisters working for the queen—get along (give or take your occasional war), something that scientists are still working to explain.
The Swiss economist Ernst Fehr and his colleagues have proposed a theory of “strong reciprocity,” which they define as “a willingness to sacrifice resour
ces for rewarding fair and punishing unfair behavior even if this is costly and provides neither present nor future material rewards for the reciprocator.” This is, after all, what we are doing when we go out of our way to scold someone on the road. In experimental games that involve people donating money into a communal investment pot, the best outcome for all players is achieved when everyone pools their resources. But a single player can do best if they contribute nothing, skimming off everyone else’s profits instead. (This is like the person who drives to the front of a lengthy queue waiting to exit the highway and jumps in at the last minute.) Gradually, players stop contributing to the pool. Cooperation breaks down. When players in Fehr’s game are given an option to punish people for not investing, however, after a couple of rounds most people give everything they have. The willingness to punish seems to ensure cooperation.
So perhaps, as the economist Herbert Gintis suggests, certain forms of supposed “road rage” are good things. Honking at or even aggressively tailgating that person who cut you off, while not strictly in your best self-interest, is a positive for the species. “Strong reciprocators” send signals that may make would-be cheaters more likely to cooperate; in traffic, as with any evolutionary system, conforming to the rules boosts the “collective advantage” of the group, and thus helps the individual. Not doing anything raises the risk that the transgressor will harm the good-driving group. You were not thinking of the good of the species when you honked at a rude driver, you were merely angry, but your anger may have been altruistic all the same. (And, like a bird squawking to warn of an approaching predator, honking at a threatening driver does not consume much energy.) In other words: Honk if you love Darwin!
Whatever the evolutionary or cultural reasons for cooperation, the eyes are one of its most important mechanisms, and eye contact may be the most powerful human force we lose in traffic. It is, arguably, the reason why humans, normally a quite cooperative species in comparison with our closest primate relatives, can become so noncooperative on the road. Most of the time we are moving too fast—we begin to lose the ability to maintain eye contact around 20 miles per hour—or it is not safe to look. Maybe our view is obstructed. Often other drivers are wearing sunglasses, or their car may have tinted windows. (And do you really want to make eye contact with those drivers?) Sometimes we make eye contact through the rearview mirror, but it feels weak, not quite believable at first, as it is not “face-to-face.”
Because eye contact is so absent in traffic, it can feel uncomfortable when it does happen. Have you ever been stopped at a light and “felt” someone in a neighboring car looking at you? It probably made you uneasy. The first reason for this is that it may violate the sense of privacy we feel in traffic. The second is that there is no purpose for it and no appropriate neutral reaction, a condition that can provoke a fight-or-flight response. So what did you do at the intersection when you saw someone looking at you? If you sped up, you were not alone. In one study, researchers had an accomplice drive up on a scooter next to cars waiting at a traffic signal and stare at the driver of a neighboring car. These drivers roared through the intersection faster than those who were not stared at. Another study had a pedestrian stare at a driver waiting at the light. The result was the same. This is why trying to make eyes at your neighboring driver is bound to fail, and it is the larger problem with in-car dating networks like Flirting in Traffic, which allow drivers to send messages (via an anonymous e-mail to a MySpace-style Web site) to people bearing a special sticker. Most people—except middle-aged guys in Ferraris—do not want to be stared at while driving.
When you need to do something like change lanes, however, eye contact is a key traffic signal. On television’s Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld was on to something when he advised George Costanza, who was waving his hand while trying to negotiate a difficult New York City merge, “I think we’re gonna need more than a hand. They have to see a human face.”
Many studies have confirmed this: Eye contact greatly increases the chances of gaining cooperation in various experimental games (it worked for Seinfeld’s George, by the way). Curiously, the eyes do not even need to be real. One study showed that the presence of cartoon eyes on a computer screen made people give more money to another unseen player than when the eyes were not present. In another study, researchers put photographs of eyes above an “honor system” coffee machine in a university break room. The next week, they replaced it with a photograph of flowers. This cycle was repeated for a number of weeks. Consistently, more people made donations on “eye” weeks. The very design of our eyes, which contain more visible sclera, or “white,” than those of any of our closest primate relatives, may have even evolved, it has been argued, to facilitate cooperation in humans. This greater proportion of white helps us “catch someone’s eye,” and we’re particularly sensitive to the direction of one’s gaze. Infants will eagerly follow your glance upward but are less likely to follow if you close your eyes and simply tilt your head up. The eyes, one might argue, help reveal what we would like; eye contact is also a tacit admission that we do not think we will be harmed or exploited if we disclose our intentions.
There are times when we do not want to signal our intentions. This is why some poker players wear sunglasses. It also helps explain another game: driving in Mexico City. The ferocity of Mexico City traffic is revealed by the topes, or speed bumps, that are scattered throughout the capital like the mysterious earthen mounds of an ancient civilization. Mexico City’s speed bumps may be the largest in the world, and in their sheer size they are bluntly effective at curbing the worst impulses of chilango (as the capital’s residents are known) motorists. Woe to the driver who hits one at anything but the most glacial creep. Older cars have been known to stall out at a bump’s crest and be turned into a roadside food stand.
Topes are hardly the only traffic hazard in Mexico City. There are the secuestros express, or “express kidnappings,” in which, typically, a driver stopped at a light will be taken, at gunpoint, to an ATM and forced to withdraw cash. Often the would-be criminal is more nervous than the victim, says Mario González Román, a former security official with the U.S. embassy and himself a kidnapping victim. Calmness is essential. “Most of the people dead in carjackings are people that send the wrong signal to the criminal,” he explained while driving the streets of the capital in his 1976 Volkswagen Beetle (known as a vocho). “You have to facilitate the work of the criminal. If the car is all he wants, you are lucky.”
Express kidnappings, thankfully, are fairly rare in Mexico City. The more common bane of driving in the Distrito Federal is the endless number of intersections without traffic lights. Who will go, who will yield—it is an intricate social ballet with rough, vague guidelines. “There is no order, it’s whoever arrives first,” according to Agustín Barrios Gómez, an entrepreneur and sometime politico, as he drove in the Polanco neighborhood in his battered Nissan Tsuru, a car that seemed a bit beneath his station. “Mexican criminals are very car-conscious and watch-conscious,” he explained. “In Monterrey I wear a Rolex; here I wear a Swatch.” At each crossing, he slowed briefly to assess what the driver coming from the left or right might be doing. The problem was that cars often seemed to be arriving at the same time. In one of these instances, he barreled through, forcing a BMW to stop. “I did not make eye contact,” he said firmly, after clearing the intersection.
Eye contact is a critical factor at unmarked intersections in Mexico City. Look at another driver and he will know that you have seen him, and thus dart ahead of you. Not looking at a driver shifts the burden of responsibility to him (assuming he has actually seen you), which allows you to proceed first—if, that is, he truly believes you are not aware of him. There’s always the chance that both drivers are not actually looking. In the case of Barrios Gómez, the perceived social cost of stopping might have been greater for the BMW, higher as it is in the social hierarchy than an old Nissan Tsuru; then again, the BMW had more to lose in terms of sheer car value by n
ot stopping. Drivers not wanting to cooperate, unwilling to begin that relationship of “reciprocal altruism,” simply do not look, or they pretend not to look—the dreaded “stare-ahead.” It is the same with the many beggars found at intersections in Mexico City. It is easier not to give if one does not make eye contact, which is why one sees, as in other cities, so many drivers looking rigidly ahead as they wait for the light.
Your daily drive may not seem to have much to do with the strategies of the Cold War, but every time two cars approach an unmarked intersection simultaneously, or four cars sidle up to a four-way stop at about the same time, a form of game theory is being applied. Game theory, as defined by the Nobel Prize–winning economist Thomas Schelling, is the process of strategic decision making that occurs when, as in a nuclear standoff or a stop-sign showdown, “two or more individuals have choices to make, preferences regarding the outcomes, and some knowledge of the choices available to each other and of each other’s preferences. The outcome depends on the choices that both of them make, or all of them if there are more than two.”
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