Why you probably hated drive

Here's a scenario that should be familiar: You're driving along on the highway. Suddenly, without signaling, a massive SUV comes barreling into your lane from the right, forcing you to jam on the brakes and swerve out of the way to avoid a collision.

In his short, Motor Mania , Goofy plays Mr. Walker, a law abiding, kind, and courteous citizenuntil he steps into his car. All of a sudden Mr. Walker undergoes a Hydian transformation, becoming Mr. Wheeler, a reckless, selfish, "uncontrollable monster. Wheeler screams at other motorists, flies off the handle at the slightest perceived provocation, and through it all still considers himself a good driver. Part of the problem has to do with what psychologists call "deindividuation.

This can happen in a number of different scenarios and contexts, but anonymity perceived or real is always a key ingredient. One well known study, conducted by psychologist Philip Zimbardo in , took a group of female students at NYU, gave them hoods, put them in the dark, assigned them numbers to replace their names, and then asked them to administer shocks to other students.

Zimbardo found that compared to subjects who were just wearing name tags, the hooded participants were willing to administer twice the level of electric shock no one was actually shocked to others. Then there's Ed Diener's famous Halloween Candy experiment in which 1, trick-or-treating children were given the opportunity to steal candy and money under a number of different controlled scenarios.

The kids stole significantly more candy and money when they were a part of a larger group and weren't asked for their names and addresses at the house. The least amount of stealing happened when trick-or-treaters were solo and were asked for identifying information. While anonymity doesn't automatically beget antisocial actions, it can lead to more aggressive, less inhibited behavior, says psychologist Jamie Madigan.

Those conditions? Being part of a group and not being held responsible for your actions. Like, for example, online games, message boards, and chat rooms, says Madigan, who focuses on the psychology of video games. Anonymity, he says, "leaves people more open and susceptible to suggestion or to being influenced by real or perceived conditions.

And cars, it turns out, work pretty much the same way as an identity-masking hood. In his book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do , journalist Tom Vanderbilt points out that while driving, people are surrounded by others part of a group , and yet they're also cut off anonymous , enclosed in steel and glass shells. In fact, when you look at Zimbardo's description of conditions that contribute to a sense of deindividuation, it basically reads like a list of everyday road conditions.

How do they feel about texting? Phone calls? Other distractions? Do they cut people off? They also asked the same employees a series of questions about their work lives. Does their work cut into their time with their families? Do their bosses bully them? Employees who said they had a worse time at work were substantially more likely to report bad behavior on their way home.

Maybe if a work-related bad mood does contribute in some way to more reckless behavior, public health workers could figure out a way to interrupt that mood and refocus workers on the tasks of the road ahead. At the very least, this research adds to an ever-growing stack of evidence that the way workers feel at work can be a matter of life or death. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options.

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