Unsurprisingly, most Americans disapprove of antisocial behavior. Stealing people’s things, circumventing food safety rules or smoking in large crowds often elicit harsh responses.
But when you get behind the wheel of a car, all that disapproval melts away.
That’s because many of us suffer from a disease called “auto-brain” — although Ian Walker, a professor of environmental psychology at Swansea University in Wales, prefers to call it “motor normativity.” This is the term coined by Walker and his team to describe the “cultural inability to think objectively and level-headedly” about how we use cars.
Many of us suffer from a disease called “auto brain”.
Think of it as “heteronormativity,” the idea that heterosexual couples “automatically, but inappropriately, assume that all other people fit into their own categories,” but for cars.
Walker noted that people tend to have a giant blind spot when it comes to certain behaviors related to driving, whether it’s speeding, CO2 emissions, traffic accidents, or any of the many other negative externalities that are the result of a culture that focuses on cars. drivers.
“One of the things you notice when you spend your entire career trying to get people to drive less is that people don’t like driving less,” Walker said in an interview. “We said, well, let’s try to measure this. Let’s just demonstrate to what extent the population as a whole will make excuses, give special freedom to the context of driving.
To achieve this, he devised a series of sayings to eradicate these unconscious biases. The statements were divided into two categories: one about cars and driving and another in which keywords and phrases were replaced to make it about a different activity. Both sets of statements were presented to a sample of 2,157 adults in the UK, who were then asked to agree or disagree.
“One of the things you notice when you spend your entire career trying to get people to drive less is that people don’t like driving less.”
For example, people were asked to agree or disagree with the following statement: “People should not smoke in densely populated areas where other people have to inhale the cigarette smoke.” They were then asked to respond to a parallel statement about driving: “People shouldn’t be allowed to drive in densely populated areas where other people have to inhale the car fumes.”
While three-quarters of respondents agreed with the first statement (“People should not smoke…”), only 17 percent agreed with the second (“People should not drive…”).
Another statement was about values around theft of personal property. Respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement: “If someone leaves their belongings on the street and they are stolen, it is their own fault that they left them there and the police should not be expected to act” as well as the parallel statement, “If someone leaves their car on the street and it gets stolen, it is their own fault for leaving it there and the police should not be expected to act.”
While three-quarters of respondents agreed with the first statement (“People should not smoke…”), only 17 percent agreed with the second (“People should not drive…”)
Only 8 percent of people disagreed with the first statement, while 55 percent of people disagreed with the second.
Similar results were found for questions about food and health safety, alcohol consumption and workplace injuries. People were less tolerant of bad behavior that didn’t involve a car and much more tolerant of similar-sounding behavior that involved driving.
For Walker, this disconnection is where motor normativity comes into play. “We wanted to show that when you talk about driving, people aren’t applying their normal values,” he said.
The smoking issue in particular fascinated Walker for several reasons. For decades, society tolerated and even encouraged smoking in public places. But then growing awareness around the public health risks associated with secondhand smoke, coupled with stricter government regulations, led to a shift in public perception. The same could eventually apply to driving, he said.
For Walker, this disconnection is where motor normativity comes into play
“The fact that smoking has shifted so much that almost everyone we spoke to said no, that’s not acceptable — those same people wouldn’t have said that 20 years ago,” Walker said. “And so the comparison between smoking and driving interests me because it shows us where we can go in the future when people’s minds start to change.”
Given the entrenched car culture in countries around the world, it can take much longer to change people’s attitudes about driving than cigarettes do. First, we don’t see driving through the lens of public health, which prevents most of us from thinking about the societal harms and inequalities associated with car use.
That’s because driving is a convenience for most people. And because it’s easy, we tend to assume it’s part of the natural order of driving. That’s why there’s so much animosity around cycling and alternative modes of transportation: because it challenges the natural order of driving for many people.
“Not only do people do what makes the world easy, but because it feels easy, people conclude it’s right,” Walker said.