James, Leon and Nahl, Diane (2002). Dealing With Stress And Pressure In The Vehicle.

Taxonomy of
Driving Behavior: Affective, Cognitive, Sensorimotor. Chapter In J. Peter Rothe, Editor. Driving Lessons
- Exploring Systems That Make Traffic Safer. University of Alberta Press, Edmonton, Canada.

Dealing with stress and pressure in the vehicle

Taxonomy of Driving Behavior:

Affective, Cognitive, Sensorimotor
 
 

Dr. Leon James

Dr. Diane Nahl

University of Hawaii
October 2002
 
Contents
 
 TOC \O "1-3" WHY DRIVING IS STRESSFUL
ROAD RAGE AND AGGRESSIVE DRIVING................. PAGEREF
_TOC472679429 \H
WHY PRIOR INTERVENTIONS HAVE BEEN UNSUCCESSFUL PAGEREF
_TOC472679430 \H
FROM TRAFFIC SAFETY TO DRIVING PSYCHOLOGY PAGEREF
_TOC472679431 \H
DRIVER SELF-WITNESSING......................................... PAGEREF _TOC472679432
\H
THE DRIVER'S THREEFOLD SELF--AFFECTIVE, COGNITIVE,
SENSORIMOTOR PAGEREF _TOC472679433 \H
THE MENTAL HEALTH OF
DRIVERS....................................................................................
TAXONOMY OF DRIVING
BEHAVIOR....................................................................................
SUMMARY OF CURRENT
APPLICATIONS..........................................................................
BASIC PRINCIPLES IN DRIVING
PSYCHOLOGY...............................................................
APPLIED PROGRAMS AND
TECHNIQUES.........................................................................
THE FUTURE OF DRIVING............................................. PAGEREF
_TOC472679439 \H

1
 REFERENCES...............................................................................................................
............
APPENDIX A:  ADDITIONAL ENTRIES FOR THE TAXONOMY PAGEREF
_TOC472679441 \H
 
 

Why Driving is Stressful

 
Driving in traffic routinely involves events and incidents. Events are normal sequential
maneuvers such as stopping for the light, changing lanes, or putting on the brakes.
Incidents are frequent but unpredictable events. Some of these are dangerous and
frightening, like near-misses, while others are merely annoying or depressing, like
missing one's turn or being insulted by a motorist. Driving events and incidents are
sources of psychological forces capable of producing powerful feelings and irrational
thought sequences.  Driving is a highly dramatic activity that millions of people perform
on a routine daily basis.  The drama stems from high risk and unpredictability.  Driving
has two conflictual structural components--predictability and unpredictability.  Both are
present all of the time.  Predictability, like maintaining steady speed in one's lane,
creates safety, security, and escape from disaster.  Unpredictability, like impulsive lane
changes without signaling, creates danger, stress, and crashes.  For many people
driving is linked to the value of freedom of locomotion.  On the one hand they get into
cars and drive off where they please, the very symbol of freedom and
independence.  But on the other hand, as they are ready to take off into the open, they
encounter restrictions and constrictions, preventing them from driving as they wish due
to regulations and congestion.
 
The following list identifies 15 widely known conflictual aspects of driving that act as
stressors.  These are emotional challenges that are common occasions for expressing
hostility and aggressiveness on highways and streets.
 
1.     Immobility:  Most of the body during driving remains still and passive, not like
walking where the entire body exerts effort and remains continuously
active.  Tension tends to build up when the body is physically restricted and
constricted.
 
2.     Constriction:  Motor vehicles are restricted to narrow bands of highway and street
lanes.  In congested traffic, one's progress is inevitably going to be continuously
blocked by numerous other cars.  Being thwarted from going forward when you
expect to, arouses the emotion of restriction and constriction, and along with it,
anxiety and the desire to escape from the constriction.  This anxiety and avoidance
prompts drivers to perform risky or aggressive maneuvers that get them and others
into trouble.
 
3.     Regulation:  Driving is a regulated activity, which means that government agencies
and law enforcement officers get to tell drivers how fast to drive where, and

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 how.  Cars and trucks have powerful engines capable of going faster than what is
allowed--ever.  Drivers are punished for violating these regulations which they are
responsible for knowing and obeying.  This imposition, though lawful and necessary,
arouses a rebellious streak in many people, which then allows them to regularly
disregard whatever regulations seem wrong to them at the time or in the mood they
are in.
 
4.     Lack of control:  Traffic follows the laws that govern flow patterns like rivers, pipes,
blood vessels, and streaming molecules.  In congested traffic, the flow depends on
the available spaces around the cars, as can be ascertained from an aerial view
such as a traffic helicopter, or from a bridge above the highway.  When one car
slows down, hundreds of other cars behind run out of space and must tap their
brakes to slow down or stop altogether, as in gridlock.  No matter how one drives, it's
not possible to beat the traffic waves, whose cause or origin starts miles from where
you are.  This lack of control over what happens is frustrating, stress producing, and
tends to lead to venting one's anger on whoever is around--another driver, a
passenger, a pedestrian, a construction worker, the government.
 
5.     Being put in danger:  Cars are loved by their owners and they are expensive to
fix.  Even a scratch is stress producing because it reduces the car's value and is
expensive to repair.  Congested traffic filled with impatient and aggressive drivers
creates many hair raising close calls and hostile incidents within a few minutes of
each other.  Physiological stress is thus produced, along with many negative
emotions--fear, resentment, rage, helplessness, bad mood, and depression.
 
6.     Territoriality:  The symbolic portrayal of the car has tied it to individual freedom and
self-esteem, promoting a mental attitude of defensiveness and
territoriality.  Motorists consider the space inside the car as their castle and the
space around the car as their territory.  The result is that they repeatedly feel
insulted or invaded while they drive, lulling them into a hostile mental state, even to
warlike postures and aggressive reactions to routine incidents that are suddenly
perceived as skirmishes, battles, or duels between drivers.  For many motorists,
driving has become a dreaded daily drudge, an emotional roller coaster difficult to
contain and a source of danger and stress.
 
7.     Diversity:  There are about 200 million licensed drivers in North America today, and
they represent a diversity of drivers who vary in experience, knowledge, ability,
style, and purpose for being on the road.  These social differences reduce our
sense of predictability because drivers with different ability and purpose don't
behave according to the expected norms.  The peace and confidence of
motorists is shaken by events that are unexpected, and driving becomes more
complex, more emotionally challenging.  Diversity or plurality increases stress
because it creates more unpredictability.
 

3
8.     Multi-tasking:  The increase in dashboard complexity and in-car activities like eating,
talking on the phone, checking voice e-mail, challenge people's ability to remain alert
and focused behind the wheel.  Drivers become more irritated at each other when
their attention or alertness seems to be lacking due to multi-tasking behind the
wheel.  Multi-tasking without adequate training increases stress by dividing attention
and reducing alertness.
 
9.     Denying our mistakes:  Driving is typically done by automatic habits compiled over
years, and this means that much of it is outside people's conscious
awareness.  Typically drivers tend to exaggerate their own "excellence," overlooking
their many mistakes.  When passengers complain or, when other drivers are
endangered by these mistakes, there is a strong tendency to deny the mistakes and
to see complaints as unwarranted.  This denial allows drivers to feel self-righteous
and indignant at others, enough to want to punish and retaliate, adding to the
general hostility and stress level on highways.
 
10.  Cynicism:  Many people have learned to drive under the supervision of parents and
teachers who are critical and judgmental.  We don’t just learn to manipulate the
vehicle; we also acquire an over-critical mental attitude towards it.  As children we're
exposed to this constant judgmental behavior of our parents who drive us
around.  It's also reinforced in movies portraying drivers behaving badly.  This
culture of mutual cynicism among motorists promotes an active and negative
emotional life behind the wheel.  Negative emotions are stress producing.
 
11.  Loss of objectivity:  Driving incidents are not neutral:  there is always someone who
is considered to be at fault.  There is a natural tendency to want to attribute fault to
others rather than to self.  This self-serving bias even influences the memory of what
happened, slanting the guilt away from self and laying it on others.  Drivers lose
objectivity and right judgment when a dispute comes up.  Subjectivity increases
stress by strengthening the feeling that one has been wronged.
 
12.  Venting:  Part of our cultural heritage is the ability to vent anger by reciting all the
details of another individual's objectionable behavior.  The nature of venting is such
that it increases by its own logic until it breaks out into overt hostility and even
physical violence.  It requires motivation and self-training to bring venting under
control before it explodes into the open.  Until it's brought under conscious control,
venting is felt as an energizing "rush" and promotes aggressiveness and
violence.  Nevertheless, this seductive feeling is short-lived and is accompanied by a
stream of anger-producing thoughts that impair our judgment and tempt us into rash
and dangerous actions.  Repeated venting takes its toll on the immune system and
acts as physiological stress with injurious effects on the cardio-vascular system
(Williams and Williams, 1993).
 
13.  Unpredictability:  The street and highway create an environment of drama, danger,
and uncertainty.  In addition heat, noise and smells act as physiological stress and
aggravate feelings of frustration and resentment.  Competition, hostility, and rushing

4
 further intensify the negative emotions.  The driving environment has become
tedious, brutish, and dangerous, difficult to adjust to on the emotional plane.
 
14.  Ambiguity:  Motorists don't have an accepted or official gestural communication
language.  There is no easy way of saying "Oops, I'm sorry!" as we do in a bank
line.  This allows for ambiguity to arise:  "Did he just flip me off or was that an
apology?"  It would no doubt help if vehicles were equipped with an electronic
display allowing drivers to flash pre-recorded messages.  Lack of clear
communication between motorists creates ambiguity, which contributes to stress.
 
15.  Undertrained in emotional intelligence:  Traditionally, driver education was
conceived as acquainting students with some general principles of safety, followed
by a few hours of supervised hands-on experience behind the wheel, or on a driving
simulator.  Developing sound judgment and emotional self-control were not part of
the training, even though these goals were mentioned as essential.  Most drivers
today are untrained or under-trained, in cognitive and affective skills.  Cognitive skills
are good habits of thinking and judgment.  Affective skills are good habits of attitude
and motivation.  Drivers thus lack the necessary coping abilities such as how to cool
off when angered or frustrated, or how to cooperate with the traffic flow and not
hinder it.  This lack of training in emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1995) creates high
stress conditions for most drivers.
 
It is common to relate aggressiveness to social and environmental factors, in addition to
individual personality factors.  For instance, congestion on highways and anonymity in
cars interact with faulty attitudes and inadequate coping skills to produce aggressive
traffic behavior under certain identifiable critical conditions.  These apparent triggering
conditions are accidental because they are unpredictable, and involve symbolic
meaning for the dignity or self-worth of the interactants who may later report having felt
insulted or threatened.  It is part of popular psychology to call these provocative and
dramatic conditions "triggers" as in, "It's not my fault. He provoked me.  It's his fault. He
made me do it."  The trigger theory of anger serves to absolve the perpetrator from
some or all of the responsibility for the aggression or violence.  Here the attackers see
themselves as the victims through a self-serving speech act (Searle, 1969) by which
they escape culpability and opprobrium.  It is common for road ragers to show no
remorse for their assault and battery, seeing what they did as justified and deserved.
 

Road Rage and Aggressive Driving

 
For millions of people driving has become a health risk, an economic risk, and a daily
hassle, if not tragedy.  The highway environment has turned hostile and
dangerous.  Government regulation of traffic and transportation has vastly increased.  A
dozen states have passed aggressive driving bills that change what was merely a ticket
and a check, to a misdemeanor or a felony, with mandatory classes in how to manage
your traffic emotions.  Law enforcement initiatives against aggressive drivers are called
"aggressive initiatives" while federal agencies are promoting the use of integrated action

5
between several forces, including helicopter support.  Society's war on aggressive
driving appears to be accelerating in the media and on the World Wide Web where
numerous activist groups promote citizen involvement in monitoring and reporting the
license plates of aggressive drivers.  The appearance in this politicizing of aggressive
driving is that aggressive drivers are a group of dangerous people like car thieves or
bank robbers.  But my research on what drivers think and feel behind the wheel
convinces me that aggressive driving is a cultural norm, not a deviant behavior.  We
acquire these hostile driving norms in childhood as passengers and as adults, we
practice the cultural habit and pass it on to our children.  Individual differences remain
so that the frequency and modality of expressing hostility is conditioned by social
factors--gender, education, age, personality style, demeanor, or conduct.  For instance,
we would expect gender differences in driving aggressiveness to be consistent with
cultural norms for violence in the family or workplace.  Some relevant findings from a
Web survey of 2010 respondents in 1988 (James, 1998).  They were responding to
itemized lists of driving behaviors often considered aggressive and illegal.  By checking
an item, the respondent was making a confession or a self-witnessing report "I
sometimes engage in this behavior."  By tabulating the results in terms of demographic
variables, one can explore various cultural influences on specific forms of aggressive
driving.
 
                                                                  MEN               WOMEN
      making illegal turns                                    18%                12%
      not signaling lane changes                      26%                20%
      following very close                                     15%                13%
      going through red lights                  9%                 7%
      swearing, name calling                             59%                57%
      speeding 15 to 25 mph                  46%                32%
      yelling at another driver                              34%                31%
      honking to protest                           39%                36%
      revving engine to retaliate              12%                8%
      making an insulting gesture                     28%                20%
      tailgating dangerously                                14%                9%
      shining bright lights to retaliate                25%                13%
      braking suddenly to punish                       35%                29%
      deliberately cutting off                                 19%                10%
      using car to block the way             21%                13%
      using car as weapon to attack                  4%                  1%
      chasing a car in hot pursuit                       15%                4%
      getting into a physical fight                         4%                 1%
 
For each of these aggressive driving behavior, more men report doing it than
women.  The differences in percentage points are statistically significant for all
items.  These results confirm what earlier surveys have found, that men drive more
aggressively than women and manifest road rage symptoms more regularly.  However,
popular surveys also show a growing number of women are engaging in aggressive

6
driving behavior and are involved in a higher rate of non-fatal accidents than men
(Woman Motorist, 1999).  The greater aggressiveness of men drivers and the
increasing aggressiveness of women drivers are cultural trends reflecting an expanding
permissiveness towards the expression of anger behind the wheel.  Some of the rise in
women's aggressive driving is attributed to the increased presence of women in the
workplace.  There are 88 million licensed women drivers in the U.S. today.  The
proportion of women in the driver population rose from 43 percent  in 1963 to 50
percent in 1999.  More women are stuck in congested traffic, and more of the
female gender experiences the stress and frustration men have endured for
decades.  Additionally, women have more stops to make while they cart children to
school, sports, and lessons, as well as driving to work, running errands, shopping
and banking.  Women are forced to drive under time pressure during
congestion.  As a result, auto insurance rates for young women are now closer to
that of inexperienced young men, who are still being charged 185 percent above
the base rate.
 
Health professionals generally attribute part of the increase in driving "pugnacity" to
social factors such as swelling congestion, urbanization, dual-income families,
workplace downsizing that increases crowding, family discord, job dissatisfaction, and
physical illness.  The connection between stress and illness has long been established
in medicine and new research shows that driving related stress is no different from life
stress in the way it affects our health (APA Monitor, 1996).  The overt expression of
anger and hostile behavior is normally "inhibited" or kept under wraps because we are
directly or indirectly punished for it in various ways.  In the past decade, public schools
have implemented conflict resolution or peer mediation programs designed to help
children acquire the habit of resolving disagreements non-physically, non-violently
(Goleman, 1995).  The key element of this civilized conduct is the skill of inhibiting the
physical expression of anger or fear, so it doesn't come out in provocative or violent
behavior.  When a neighbor encroaches upon your territory, normally you don't start
shooting or suing.  You first find out what's going on, why, and what you can do about it
peacefully and lawfully, such as talking it over or lodging a complaint.  This principle of
non-aggressiveness has been thrown overboard by the culture of cynicism on
highways.  As educators and change agents, we must find ways to restore it.
 
Perhaps the biggest cause of unsafe highways is people's unwillingness to scrutinize
their own conduct, preferring to blame other drivers.  Surveys consistently show that
most people have an inflated self-image of their motoring ability, rating the safety of
their own driving as much better than the average motorist's.  For instance, two out of
three drivers (67 percent) rate themselves almost perfect in excellence as a driver (9 or
10 on a 10-point scale), while the rest consider themselves above average (6 to
8).  Surveys typically show that 70 percent of drivers report being a victim of an
aggressive driver, while only 30 percent admit to being aggressive drivers.  This
suggests that most drivers overlook their own faults and overestimate their
competence.  One way to examine this hypothesis is to compare the aggressiveness of

7
the two-thirds majority of drivers who rate themselves as near perfect with the one-third
minority that see themselves "above average, but with some room to improve."
 
The difference is dramatic!  The drivers who considered themselves near perfect in
excellence with no room for improvement, also confess to significantly more
aggressiveness than drivers who see themselves still improving.  This reveals the lack
of objectivity in self-assessment shown by two out of three drivers.  Despite their self-
confessed aggressiveness, they still insist on thinking of themselves as near perfect
drivers with almost no room to improve.  This egocentric phenomenon can be seen in
specific forms of aggressive behaviors.  For example, those who see themselves as
near perfect drivers, admit to twice as much chasing of other cars compared to those
who see themselves as less perfect.  The difference:  15 percent vs. 8 percent is
statistically significant.  The fact is clear:  part of being an aggressive driver is to deny
that you need to improve.  This is what I call resistance to change.
 

Why Prior Interventions Have Been Unsuccessful

in Reducing Dangerous Driver Behavior
 
In North America, cars have been mass produced for 103 years and there are now
177 million licensed drivers in the United States alone. Driving is the most
dangerous activity for the majority of people in an industrialized society. Driving
accidents have killed millions of people since 1900 and the number of deaths and
injuries increase in proportion to the number of drivers and the total number of
miles driven in an area or region. In North America, deaths and serious injuries
from driving accidents were reduced as a result of these developments:
 
1. more and better roads
thus, safer roads with better traction, visibility, and maintenance
2. better designed cars
thus, cars equipped with better safety devices and crash proof designs
that save lives—safety belt, air bag, child restraint car seat, shock
absorption and controlled collapse, crash tests with dummies
3. better medical emergency services and infrastructure on highways and streets
thus, more survivors after crashes
4. better law enforcement
including, more personnel, use of electronic surveillance devices on
highways and key intersections, new legislation to facilitate the conviction
of guilty drivers, greater involvement of courts in remedial driver training
for offenders
5. mandated driver and safety education in schools
including graduated licensing and other special provisions for elderly and
handicapped drivers
6. more sophisticated transportation management systems

8
 computer controlled traffic lights, traffic calming devices, re-routing
schemes, HOV lanes, alternative transportation initiatives
7. economic incentives for drivers who remain accident free
added insurance cost for accident prone drivers, increased
incentives or insurance reductions for accident-free drivers,
special benefits accruing to enrolling in refresher courses
and other self-improvement activities
It’s important to note that despite these definite and significant improvements in the
seven areas indicated, the rate of traffic deaths and injuries remains relatively constant
when viewed over a long term perspective of years and decades. For instance, in the
1950s the annual fatality rate due to driving accidents was around 50,000 while in the
1990s it has been around 40,000. Yes, there is a reduction, but the curve has quickly
leveled off and remains above 40,000 deaths and over 5 million injuries annually in
the U.S. There seem to be two opposing forces operating.
 
On the one hand, the external environmental forces for greater safety (less risk):
      The construction of more and better highways to accommodate the
increasing numbers of drivers every year
      The design of better and safer vehicles
      A more efficient medical infrastructure to handle victims of crashes
      Greater use of highway law enforcement and electronic surveillance as
deterrents
 
And on the other hand, the internal individual forces for maintaining high risk (less
safety):
      The widespread acceptance of a competitive norm that values getting
ahead of other drivers
      The daily round schedule of time pressure and its mismanagement
through rushing and disobeying traffic laws
      The weakness of driver education programs so that most drivers have
inadequate training in emotional self-control as drivers
      The media portrayal of aggressive driving behaviors in a fun context
      The psychological tendency to maintain a preferred level of risk, so that
increased risks are taken when environmental improvements are
introduced (also called "risk homeostasis", see Wilde, 1994; 1988)
 
Scientists and safety officials attribute this resistance to accident reduction to the
attitude and behavior of drivers who tend to respond to safety improvements by driving
more dangerously. It has been noted that a critical aspect of driving is the driver’s
competence in balancing risk with safety. The risk in driving is largely under the control
of the driver. The driver decides at every moment what risks to take and what to inhibit
or avoid. Risk taking is a tendency that varies greatly between drivers as well as for the
same driver at different times. Thus, if a road is made safer by straightening it, or by
moving objects that interfere with visibility, drivers will compensate for the greater safety
by driving faster on it—the so-called "risk homeostasis" phenomenon. The result is the

9
maintenance of a constant subjective feeling of risk that is the normal habitual threshold
for a particular driver. In such a driving environment, the rate of deaths or injuries tends
to remain high, despite the safety improvements that are introduced.
 
The institutional or societal response to this stalemate between safety and
risk tolerance, has been to increase enforcement activities by monitoring, ticketing, and
jailing hundreds of thousands of drivers. Nevertheless, the number of deaths and
injuries has remained nearly steady, year after year. Besides law enforcement, there
has been an increase in litigation due to aggressive driving disputes between drivers, as
well as more psychotherapy and counseling services, including anger management
clinics and workshops, and community initiatives. Nevertheless, these remain scattered
attempts, and have been unable to alter basic driving patterns.  As detailed in this
chapter, socio-cultural methods need to be used to change the driving norms of an
entire generation.
 

From Traffic Safety to Driving Psychology

 
Driver education and training continue to focus on imparting a minimum knowledge of
safety principles and of vehicle operation and manipulation.  Courses and manuals
generally include a brief section on "driver attitude" and "driver error" and this practice
constitutes an acknowledgment that personality habits of the driver ought to be
addressed in the instructional process.  My research efforts have addressed this
behavioral component, and to allow specific recognition of this subject in driver
education and training, I have proposed the phrase "driving psychology" to represent
this new driver instruction area.  Driving psychology refers to the knowledge drivers
need to cumulate throughout their career as driver--between six and seven decades for
most people in North America.  This knowledge is thus focused on self-instructional
methods as reflected by the new paradigm called "Lifelong Driver Self-
Improvement Program" consisting of a K through 12 driving psychology
curriculum followed by lifelong membership in a QDC (Quality Driving Circle)
(James and Nahl, 2000).
 
Driving psychology is a behavioral engineering tool.  Research in driving psychology
uses the self-witnessing approach, which is a method of generating objective data on
oneself as a driver (James, 1996).  The driver operates in three separate but interacting
behavioral areas known as affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor.  In other words, it
takes the motive of a goal destination (affective domain) to keep the car moving, as well
as a variety of related motives (affective) such as the desire (affective) to avoid a
collision or the emotion of anger (affective) at another driver.  Besides this, it takes
knowledge (cognitive domain) of vehicle operation and traffic regulations to get through,
besides making judgments (cognitive) about what other motorists are likely to do or not
to do.  And finally, it also takes the coordinated execution or performance (sensorimotor
domain) of movements in appropriate response to the motive and the judgment.  These
three behavioral domains jointly and interactively constitute driving or traffic
behavior.  My proposal for Lifelong Driver Self-Improvement Training has the purpose of

10
empowering drivers to take charge of their habit structures in these three behavioral
areas.
 
The new driving psychology and the older traffic psychology represent distinct
paradigms to the study of driver behavior, as was anticipated by the distinction between
input-output relations and those involving internal states (Michon, 1985). Input-output
models use taxonomies or inventories based on task analyses, as well as functional
control models of a mechanistic nature. Internal state models use trait analyses of
drivers and their motivational-cognitive context. Michon (1985, p. 490) considers the
input-output models as "behavioral" while the internal states models are termed
"psychological." However, driving psychology views the affective and cognitive areas as
equally behavioral to the sensorimotor. Inventories of driver tasks have so far been
based on external or public observation and description of driving performance
(McKnight and Adams, 1970). The self-witnessing approach is a way of obtaining
internal behavioral data, sometimes called "private data."
 
Driving psychology is the study of the social-psychological forces that act upon drivers
in traffic. Situations are analyzed through external as well as internal methods of data
gathering. For example, in one study the aggressiveness of drivers was measured in
terms of observed rate of speed reduction, or the making of some hostile gesture at
pedestrians in a marked crosswalk. It was found that aggressiveness of both men
and women drivers was higher against men pedestrians than women pedestrians. This
is an instance of the external analysis of driver behavior. In another study, drivers spoke
their thoughts out loud into a tape recorder giving their perceptions and reactions to
traffic events and incidents. It was found that the average trip from home and work is
filled with many incidents that arouse feelings of hostility and thoughts of mental
violence (James, 1987). This is an instance of the driver's internal behavior. An
approach that involves both internal and external analyses consists of interviewing
drivers about their driving, either "in depth" or on a questionnaire, and relating it to their
self-witnessing records. One may also have observers independently make
observations of drivers who are making self-witnessing tapes, which also allows the
correlation or concurrence of external and internal data.
 
Personality and character are related to a driver's style of coping with traffic stress. Acts,
thoughts, and feelings in driving interact in an integrated system. A driving trip typically
involves the presence of a dominant motive such as the feeling of being in a rush, or the
desire to outplay other drivers by getting ahead of them. The dominant motive (affective
domain) is a character tendency that expresses itself in other settings as well. For
example, a person may experience hostile thoughts (cognitive behavior) towards others
wherever competition is at work, whether a bank line, a restaurant, or switching traffic
lanes (sensorimotor domain). Data on the private world of drivers show that frustration
begets anger, which leads to feelings of hostility that are elaborated in mental violence
and ridicule, and finally acted out in aggressive behavior.  It is evident that the
aggressive behavior is an outward consequence of an inner interplay between the
negative feeling and its conscious justification or condoning.  This threefold aspect of
driving behavior is at the center of driving psychology.

11
 
The topics of driving psychology often overlap with traffic psychology or applied
psychology, but the method of generating the data are distinctive.  One example is the
study of risk taking in driving (Wilde, 1994). Few traffic situations are without risk.
Drivers are constantly involved with this risk. Incidents occur all the time and the threat
involved is experienced as stress. Reduction of traffic stress is a major concern for both
driving psychology and applied traffic psychology. In the old paradigm methods include
extending traffic safety education to children, providing driver education for adolescents,
and continuing driver education for adults through courses, legislation, and public media
campaigns. Driving psychology adds a new major component to these methods, namely
the idea that driver training is lifelong self-training, and that it involves training our
emotional habits in traffic, our thinking habits behind the wheel, and our style or overt
actions for which we are legally and socially responsible.
 

Driver Self-Witnessing
 
Educators and test makers have used the thinking out loud verbalizations of college
students to study their problem solving abilities (Bloom, 1956). Meichenbaum and
Goodman (1979) and Watson and Tharp (1985) have made use of silent verbalizations
in the form of self-regulatory sentences that mediate and control the overt performance
of students and clients in need of greater self-control of their behavior in many areas
(Luria, 1961). Abelson (1981) has proposed script analysis as a method of
reconstructing the cognitive activities that underlie routine behaviors such as ordering
food in a restaurant.  Ericsson and Simon (1984) have described their extensive
attempts in protocol analysis which involves the tape recording of a subject's thinking
aloud routine while engaged in problem solving activity of specific tasks (e.g., solving a
chess problem).  This work allowed Simon to create the first chess playing computer
program by rendering each thinking sequence into a program line.  More recently, the
MIT media lab is known to be creating computers that not only model human cognitive
processes but affective as well (Picard, 1997). These research and clinical efforts
represent significant advances in the scientific study of the private world of individuals.
The self-witnessing technique I developed is an attempt to obtain reliable data on the
ongoing events in the private world of drivers. This psychological aspect of driving has
not received attention in the extensive literature of driving or auto safety. The method
was also used in the analysis of self-witnessing reports written by students while
engaged in doing library research or using Web search engines (Nahl, 1998; 1997; Nahl
and James, 1996).
 
The self-witnessing method is readily meaningful to people since they are routinely
expected in their daily lives as part of being ordinary humans or citizens, to be able to
report on their own activities (What did you do?  Who was there? etc.) and mental focus
(What did you think?  What did you feel? etc.).  Drivers readily discuss many aspects of
their driving behavior, external and internal. For example, when people are asked to
write an introduction about themselves as drivers, they spontaneously mention various
aspects about themselves such as how long they have been driving; what kind of cars

12
they can drive (gear shift or automatic); how driving affects everyday life (its costs,
dangers, frustrations, stress); what images they project as a driver (power, status,
lifestyle); whether they consider themselves to be a good or bad driver; how they react
to common driving situations; how their mood changes as a result of driving episodes;
how the traffic went on a particular trip; their driving record (traffic tickets, accidents,
near misses); and some others. These are thus dimensions of discrimination along
which drivers spontaneously monitor themselves, or have the conviction that they
monitor themselves. These beliefs may be called the driver's self-image, or the
reputation of oneself as a driver.  There is a lot of protective territoriality or face work
defensiveness associated with these beliefs about oneself.
 
Interviews with drivers, or written self-assessment scales filled out by drivers, yield
retrospective data in which the respondents' recollection of facts is mixed with their self-
image as drivers. By contrast, self-witnessing reports yield data that are not
retrospective but on-going or concurrent.  The driver behind the wheel speaks out loud
into a recorder at the very moment that the emotions, thoughts, perceptions, and
actions arise spontaneously and concurrently with the act of driving. Later analysis of
the tape and transcript displays in concrete and visible terms, the overt expressions of
feelings, thoughts, and perceptions that accompanied a particular driving episode.  This
method does not claim to obtain a complete and accurate "online transaction log" of the
driver's affective states and cognitive processes, but only a sample of these.  The
adequacy of the sample needs to be evaluated theoretically and practically. The initial
effort in driving psychology has been the attempt to develop a taxonomy of driving
behavior so that there might be a theoretically justified classification system capable of
listing driver behaviors in the three domains and at relative levels of attainment or
development.

The Driver's Threefold Self--Affective, Cognitive, Sensorimotor

 
In its modern version, behaviorism is committed to a unified theory that tries to deal with
external and internal aspects of the self (Staats, 1975; Mischel, 1991). For instance, the
concept of personality is defined in terms of built-up repertoires of basic habits. These
are actually skills and errors that can be modified through further learning. This
acquisition process is going on in three distinct domains of the person's activity:
affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor.  All skills at any level of expertise contain
affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor features.  The following transcript segment from a
driver's taped self-witnessing record illustrates the threefold nature of driving behavior.
 
"Oh, no, there's a police car coming up from behind. I hope he didn't see me
driving fast. Besides, I'm not the only one who is driving fast. If he pulls me over
to the side, he has to pull everyone else over too. I'll be so embarrassed if he
pulls me over. Everyone will know that I was breaking the law."
 
Content analysis focuses on the "speech act" value of the components of verbalizations
(Searle, 1969; Nahl, 1993). For instance, "Oh, no" marks an affective stricture or a
perception of doom; and indexes an emotional flooding-out. "I hope" marks a religious

13
affection or an idealized picture of reality. "Besides, I'm not the only one" bespeaks guilt
and self-justification; it raises the specter of personal catastrophe expressed in "I'll be so
embarrassed... Everyone will know..." A little later this subject displays affections of
condemnation or disapproval when another car cut in front: "Careless and pushy drivers
always do things like that." In another episode, this person expresses anxiety and fear:
"I almost sideswiped a car which had been traveling in my blind spot. As I was turning
back into the middle lane I was in a state of mild anxiety. Thinking about what could've
happened made me scared." Thus, expressing fear in a driving incident or, showing
disapproval of another driver, are instances of affective driving behavior.  An individual's
internal dialog can be used as an index of the affective states and the cognitive
processes that constitute the internal component of any outward behavior.
 
"I should cut down on how fast I'm driving and maintain the required speed limit.
I'm in the middle lane and yet I'm driving like an aggressive person in the left
lane. I could be increasing my chance of becoming a victim on the road. If the
police pulls me over and gives me a ticket it's nobody else's fault but my own. I
should follow the rules. I don't want others to get a bad impression of me and
think that I'm a speed demon."
 
Reasoning about propriety is evident in "I should maintain the proper speed limit" and
"I'm driving like an aggressive person" which also indicates self-evaluation
("aggressive"). Propriety as well as morality scales are involved in the driver's
reasonings regarding the self-attribution of error. ("It's nobody else's fault but my own"),
while the entry "I don't want others to get a bad impression of me" reveals this person's
image management techniques.  In the following entry the driver seems to be
overwhelmed with the reasoned consequences of his action:
 
"I'm thinking to myself I could have killed the guy back there. I'm so careless. He
must be swearing at me and saying what an idiot I am. I could've smashed up my
brother's car."
 
Note that this self-analysis includes imagining what the others are thinking, feeling, or
saying ("He must be swearing...").  Witnessing and describing one's reasoning about a
driving situation, or attributing an error to oneself, provide data on the driver's cognitive
behavior.  In the next segment the driver is giving some details on sensorimotor
behavior, including the sensation of getting warmer.
 
"I'll drive at the required speed limit and get to my destination safely. I'm leaning
slightly forward in my seat rather than my normal slightly reclined position. I have
both hands on the steering wheel rather than my normal one hand. And I can feel
my temperature rising.  My stomach feels queasy."
 
Some of this sensory or motor information might be available to special instrumentation,
a well-placed camera, or an observer riding along ("I am leaning slightly forward in my
seat"), but the meaning of this act would remain obscure without the concurrent self-
witnessing report ("rather than my normal slightly reclined position"--indicating

14
a perception of abnormalcy in the sensation) or would require enormously sophisticated
instrumentation ("My stomach feels queasy").  Witnessing and describing sensations or
motor actions provide data on the driver's sensorimotor behavior.
 

The Mental Health Of Drivers

 
My cumulative research using the self-witnessing reports of hundreds of drivers, reveals
an agitated inner world of driving that is replete with extreme emotions and impulses
seemingly triggered by little acts. Ordinary drivers can display maniacal thoughts,
violent feelings, virulent speech, and physiological signs of high stress.
 
"Right now I feel scared, anxious, fearful, panic stricken, agitated, bothered,
irritated, annoyed, angry, mad. I feel like yelling and hitting. I'm thinking, Oh, no
what's he doing. What's happening. How could he do that. and I hear myself
saying out loud, @#$%  Stupid guy!  I'm breathing fast, gripping the wheel,
perspiring, sitting up straight and slightly forward, my eyes are open and
watching straight ahead."
 
This incident involved a car cutting into the lane and forcing the driver to slam on the
brakes causing a chain reaction; however, no collision occurred.  The self-witnessing
reports of drivers routinely contain scary incidents of this sort in which near misses
occur. Hence it has become normal and usual for drivers to experience stress and panic
under everyday traffic conditions.  The following is a summary of the variety of negative
reactions routinely mentioned in driver self-witnessing reports.
 
Extreme Physiological Reactions:
heart pounding, momentary stopping of breathing, muscle spasms, stomach
cramps, wet hands, pallor, faintness, trembling, nausea, discoordination,
inhibition, visual fixation, facial distortion, back pain, neck cramp.

Extreme Emotional Reactions:

outbursts of anger, yelling, aggressive gestures, looking mean and glaring,
threatening with dangerous vehicle manipulation, fantasies of violence and
revenge, panic, incapacitation, distortion, regressive rigid pattern of behavior,
fear, anxiety, delusional talk against non-present drivers and objects.
Extreme Irrational Thought Sequences:
paranoic thinking that one is being followed or inspected, addressing other
drivers who are not within ear shot, script writing scenarios involving vengeance
and cruelty against "guilty" drivers, denial of reality and defensiveness when a
passenger complains of a driver's error, psychopathic interactions as when two
drivers alternately tailgate each other dangerously at high speed.
 
These findings raise an important public issue: What is the mental health of the nearly
two hundred million licensed drivers in North America? Demographic sampling
research with the self-witnessing method is needed to assess the generality of my

15
early findings. We need to create behavioral maps of drivers under varying social
and psychological conditions in order to construct a comprehensive theory of
driving behavior within the language of drivers, not the language of
scientists.  Managing the future of driving in our society requires a knowledge of
driving psychology because it provides the content needed by instructors, safety
officials, law enforcement, and all regulatory agencies in society that administer
roads, cars, and drivers.  I use the phrase "driving informatics" (Nahl, 1999) to
cover the entirety of information sources society now needs to manage its
expanding driving and automotive environment.
 
To supply the information needed for driving informatics, future research may
investigate the conditions which foster the greater internalization of compliance in
driving behavior. This may be done by having drivers give self-witnessing reports under
various independently manipulated situations, such as:
      driving in the right lane vs. the left lane
      driving to work regularly (going with the traffic) vs. by watching the
speedometer and staying within posted speed limits
      driving alone vs. driving with one or more friends
      driving in heavy traffic vs. light traffic
      driving while in a hurry after a quarrel with someone vs. other mental
states
      driving on specific roads, days, and times contrasted
      driving contrasted by demographic variables (age, experience, gender,
religion, political views, geographic location, education, vehicle driven)
      driving contrasted by individual variables (experience, training, driving
record, personality characteristics)
      and so on.
These independently manipulated environmental and experiential contrasts will reveal
how a driver's feelings, thoughts, perceptions, verbalizations, and actions (the
dependent conditions or variables) are influenced by highway conditions such as traffic
density or driver aggressiveness, or by mental states such as "when the driver feels
pressured" vs. "when the driver feels happy" (the independent conditions or variables).
Staats (1996) has explicitly recognized the possibility of designing experiments in which
affective and cognitive states are manipulated as independent variables to study their
effects on other cognitive-affective behaviors as dependent variables.  In one project, I
compared the self-witnessing reports of students in which the intervention treatment (or
independent manipulation) was to drive within speed limits for one week. The
dependent measures were self-witnessing reports for the affective, cognitive, and
sensorimotor domains of their driving behavior (threefold self). During the week of self-
imposed driving within speed limits, students commonly reported extreme paranoic
feelings and thoughts (e.g., "Everybody is giving me the stink eye for holding them up.
They are going to attack me, ram me off the road") -- which did not appear in the
baseline records while the students were driving regularly (by keeping up with traffic).
This type of baseline-intervention design is quite flexible and productive when coupled

16
with random assignment of subjects to predefined conditions to allow for statistical tests
of significance.

Taxonomy of Driving Behavior

 
The development of a comprehensive driving theory based on self-witnessing reports
makes it possible to construct a classification scheme or taxonomy that can help identify
the components of driver behavior from the perspective of the driver's world. Such an
inventory may be useful for driver assessment and driver education and can provide
norms or expectations of driving skills and errors in the affective, cognitive, and
sensorimotor domains of behavior. For instance, a driver's self-witnessing report may be
analyzed by counting the presence of affective errors (e.g., "I was so mad I didn't care if
I was going to hit him or not!"), cognitive errors (e.g., "I figured there is no speed limit in
this parking lot cause I don't remember seeing any speed limit signs here."), and
sensorimotor errors (e.g., "I lowered my window and yelled at him, 'You stupid idiot.'"). A
driver's error score can be obtained to evaluate the effect of various intervention
programs for driver self-improvement. Or, error patterns may be correlated with
demographic or psychological characteristics of drivers (e.g., men vs. women, or
contrasting age groups). These types of data are valuable for efforts in the modeling of
driver behavior, especially those involving higher control mechanisms which include
motivational and trait related aspects (Picard, 1997). As Michon (1985, p.488) has
argued, driver research should go cognitive (and I would add, affective) since human
mobility is embedded in a psycho-social environment as well as a technological one.
Feelings, thoughts, and perceptions are as much traffic and transportation issues as
road conditions and traffic flow.
 
Table 1  Driver Behavior as Skills and Errors in Three Behavioral Domains
 
PRIVATE SKILLS (+)
AFFECTIVE (+A) COGNITIVE (+C) SENSORIMOTOR (+S)
I've got to be careful here. This person looks like he's (Gesticulating and
Don't want to cut anybody in a hurry to get in. I better smiling:)Go ahead. You go
off. let him in. first.
ERRORS (-)
AFFECTIVE (-A) COGNITIVE (-C) SENSORIMOTOR (S)
I wish I could give that I don't think people like (Yelling:) "You stupid idiot,
guy a piece of my mind. that should be allowed on why don't you watch
the road where you're going!"
 
Table 1 shows the first iteration of the taxonomy in its general form and
structure.  Driving behavior is represented as a collection of skills and errors within the
three behavioral domains of the self.  The skills receive a + symbol and the errors a -
symbol.  Entries within each behavioral area are self-witnessing units culled or isolated
from the driver's self-report.  Categorization of an item is a matter of common sense,
following speech act rules known by ordinary speakers (Searle, 1969).  I have
encountered no drivers who were unable to report their emotions, thoughts, and actions

17
in traffic.  Yet there are individual differences I observed in detail, focus,
comprehensiveness, and clarity.  Future research should investigate the self-witnessing
data generated by drivers in terms of these variables.  As driver self-witnessing
becomes a generational norm and cultural practice for all drivers, the richness and
depth of the accumulating data will increase, giving us the ability to construct even
better driving theories and self-training procedures.
 
The second iteration of the taxonomy introduces three levels of development or
driver competence (1, 2, 3) within the three behavioral domains (A, C, S) and the two
skill orientations (+ vs. -).  Three behavioral domains by three developmental
levels yieldsa matrix of nine zones of possible driver behaviors.  Adding a + or -
orientation yields a total of 18 behavioral zones.  The numbering scheme in the
taxonomy follows the pattern shown in Table 2.
 
Table 2. Classification Scheme for the Taxonomy of Driver Behavior
 
Affective Cognitive Sensorimotor

Level 3 +A3 = 7 +C3 = 8 +S3 = 9

Responsibility -A3 = 16 -C3 = 17 -S3 = 18

Affective Cognitive Sensorimotor

Level 2 +A2 = 4 +C2 = 5 +S3 = 6

Safety -A2 = 13 -C2 = 14 -S3 = 15

Affective Cognitive Sensorimotor

Level 1
Proficiency +A1 = 1 +C1 = 2 +S1 = 3
-A1 = 10 -C1 = 11 -S1 = 12
 
I like to represent the taxonomy from bottom up to indicate that habits are built on top of
habits, and the higher habits are acquired later in experience, but once established,
they exert a causative (downward) influence on the lower habits.  The three domains at
Level 1 occupy Zones 1, 2, and 3, respectively, in relation to skills, and Zones 10, 11,
and 12, for errors.  Similarly for Levels 2 and 3.  The Zones 1 through 9 represent skills,
and their corresponding errors populate zones 10 through 18.  The labeling of the three
levels should be considered as part of the theory and as research continues, evidence
will evolve to allow more accurate representations of each level.  For now, I present this
iteration as the results of my studies thus far.  Level 1 driving behavior is labeled
"Proficiency" to represent the new driver's initial overriding focus on three
things:  staying calm and alert (affective proficiency), figuring out what happens around
you (cognitive proficiency), and coordinating the eyes, hands, and legs to keep the

18
vehicle from colliding (sensorimotor proficiency).  Level 2 is labeled "Safety" to
represent the motive to avoid getting into trouble (affective safety), in conjunction with
the problem-solving process of identifying trouble spots (cognitive safety), and leading
to prudent actions (sensorimotor safety).  Level 3 is labeled "Responsibility" to represent
the motive to remain accountable for hurting others (affective responsibility), which
creates prosocial rather than antisocial thought sequences and plans (cognitive
responsibility) that eventuate in the quality of driving life, whether happy or stressed out
(sensorimotor responsibility).  The full taxonomy is shown in Table 3.
 
Table 3.  The 18 Behavioral Zones of Driving
 
Cognitive Responsibility sensorimotor
Affective Responsibility  in Driving Responsibility 
in Driving C3 (+ or -) in Driving
A3 (+ or -)
S3 (+ or -)
 
 
(7)altruism and morality (8)positive dramatizations (9)enjoyment and satisfaction
and mental health
vs. vs. vs.
(16) egotism and deficient (17)negative dramatizations (18) stress and depression
conscience and insanity  
     
Affective Safety  Cognitive Safety  Sensorimotor Safety 
in Driving in Driving  in Driving 
A2 (+ or -) C2 (+ or -) S2 (+ or -)
     
(4) defensive driving and
(6) polite exchanges and
equity  (5)objective attributions 
calmness 
vs. vs.
vs.
(13) aggressiveness (14) biased attributions
(15) rude exchanges and
opportunism  
overreaction
   
 
 
Cognitive Proficiency 
Affective Proficiency in Driving  Sensorimotor Proficiency 
in Driving  C1 (+ or -) in Driving 
A1 (+ or -) S1(+ or -)

(2) knowledge and (3) correct actions and

(1) respect for regulations awareness  alertness 
and self-control 
vs. vs. vs.
(10) disrespect for authority (11) untrained and faulty (12) faulty actions and
and deficient self-control thinking inattention
     
   

19
 
The labeling of each behavioral zone is part of the theory and will need additional
confirmation by more extensive research than what I have been able to do so far.  To
clarify the theory further, I present in Appendix A several entries for each of the 18
zones.  For example, zone 1 Affective Proficiency (A1) has a skill item "Having a sense
of respect for traffic regulations and authority." (Zone +A1), while the corresponding
error item is "Feeling dislike for traffic regulations or authority figures" (Zone
-A1).  Similarly, zone 8 Cognitive Responsibility (C3) has a skill item "De-dramatizing or
neutralizing one's negative feelings in a driving situation" (Zone +C3), while the
corresponding error item is "Attaching preposterous symbolic significance to driving
exchanges (e.g., being overtaken is reprehensible)." (Zone -C3)  Every behavioral skill
zone has a corresponding error zone.  A driver may be represented as a collection of
skills and errors, each of which is a habit that can be witnessed in oneself, and modified
with appropriate habit modification procedures.  This process of habit self-modification
going on simultaneously in each of the 18 zones is what I call Lifelong Driver Self-
Improvement Program.  Therefore the QDC curriculum is based on self-witnessing
activities in the 18 zones. For more explanations see this related article.
 
An illustration of how the Driver Taxonomy can be used for planning and monitoring
self-improvement activities is shown in Table 4.  I call this type of radical overhaul in old
habit structures, a driving personality makeover.  This driver used the taxonomy to map
out a self-modification plan that wisely contained two stages. First, to do what it takes to
avoid being an aggressive driver.  Second, to do what it takes to become the opposite
of an aggressive driver, namely a supportive driver.  He decided to list for himself the
behavioral objectives in the three domains, without keeping track of the level.  He
correctly decided that the first step is affective, in this case, to "overcome his resistance
to change" and picked several affective objectives that counteract his habitual
aggressive driving motives and tap into his higher value system, which he believed he
had in reserve.  Under the prodding of this new motive, he picked several cognitive
objectives that gave him practice in counteracting his lack of objectivity when thinking
about driving situations in which was involved.  Finally, the new motive through the new
reasoning process, must actualize in civil behavior, or else it is only an imagined
change.  So he had to pick relevant sensorimotor objectives to actualize the new
persona.  This he did as shown in Table 4.
 
Table 4.  Two Stages of a Driving Personality Makeover Plan
 
Stage 1--Avoiding Being an Aggressive Driver

Affective Level Sensorimotor Level

Cognitive Level
Overcoming my resistance to Acting out civil
Learning to do rational
change
analyses of traffic incidents
behavior  
   
 
   
      committing myself to       reasoning against my       waving, smiling,  

20
 inhibit or mitigate states
of anger and retaliation signaling
      making it acceptable for attribution errors (It's       not crowding,
passenger to complain always their fault.  It's not rushing in,
or make suggestions never my fault) not swearing
      making it unacceptable       counteracting my self-       not aggressing
for myself to ridicule or serving bias in how I against
demean other drivers view incidents passengers
      activating higher       acquiring more       pretending that
motives within myself socialized self- I'm in a good
such as love of order regulatory sentences mood even
and fair play, public I can say to myself when not
spiritedness, charity,    
kindness to strangers  
 
Stage 2--Becoming a Supportive Driver
(presumes or contains stage 1)
Affective Level
Maintaining a supportive Cognitive Level
Sensorimotor Level
orientation towards other Analyzing driving situations
Behaving like a happy
 
drivers objectively
 
      feeling responsible for
errors and seeking
      acknowledging and       anticipating the
opportunities to make
knowing my driving needs of other
reparations
errors drivers and
      feeling regret at my
      planning and being helpful to
unfriendly behaviors
rehearsing the them
and impulses
modification of those       verbalizing nice
      feeling good about
behaving with civility or
habits sentiments  
      analyzing other       enjoying the
kindness
drivers' behaviors ride and
      feeling appreciation
objectively or relaxing
when being given
impartially  
advice by passenger
   
      being forgiving of others'
   
mistakes and
weaknesses
 
The second stage is the mature stage because what he had to "force himself" to avoid
doing in stage 1, he now enjoyed doing in stage 2.  This is truly a changeover.  The
supportive orientation involves a prosocial driving persona that is balanced and
objective in thinking, and non-competitive and helpful in behaving.  It is associated with
a maximum of safety and a minimum of stress while restoring the sense of fun and
enjoyment to driving.  Once such a plan is drawn up, which can only be done with self-
study or instruction and counseling, its execution involves a strategy I call "the

21
Threestep Program."  Each item on the self-modification plan is practiced one at a time
per driving trip.
 
      First step:  Acknowledging that I have this particular negative habit. (A)
      Second step:  Witnessing myself performing this negative habit. (W)
      Third step:  Modifying this habit. (M)
 
For example, having picked the item "feeling regret at my unfriendly behaviors and
impulses" for today's trip to work on, constitutes step 1, because selecting it is an act of
acknowledgment.  Then, the driver has to witness this behavior during the trip.  In other
words, he stays alert, maintaining focus on his emotions as he drives.  As soon as he
detects the presence of hostile feelings, he follows it up with sentiments of regret.  The
normal habit would be to give in to the initial hostile impulse, to magnify it, to rehearse it
several times.  All these habitual procedures are now interfered with and interrupted by
means of the sentiments of regret introjected into the event in accordance with the
plan.  This constitutes the modification.  When the threestep process is practiced on
repeated trips, the old habit sequence gradually weakens and is replaced by a new
positive habit sequence.  The cyclical process is repeated item by item.  It is apparent
from this why driver self-improvement needs to go on a lifelong basis, and why social
methods of motivation like QDC groups, are needed to help drivers to persist in it and
not give up.
 

Summary of Current Applications

 
1. Encouraging drivers to practice self-witnessing behind the wheel (self-
observation and self-monitoring record keeping using a variety of tools such as
Data Forms, Trip Logs, tape recordings, etc.)
 
2. Teaching drivers how to apply self-modification principles (Baseline/Intervention
techniques by drivers)
 
3. Teaching the Threestep Program for driving personality makeovers
 
4. Encouraging drivers to maintain a Driving Log as way of promoting their long
term involvement with self-improvement
 
5. Promoting Partnership Driving arrangements to encourage friends or co-workers
to assist drivers in self-improvement efforts
 
6. Promoting Quality Driving Circles (QDCs) as a socio-cultural method for building
up the motivation of drivers to practice lifelong self-modification activities.
      This includes a national or regional program of incentives, awards,
and benefits for drivers who maintain their QDC activities.

22
       It also includes providing guidance through instructional materials
such as TEE Cards, Keeping Track Forms, Logs or Schedules that
assist individuals in their driving exercises.
      These Forms may also be made available anonymously to
scientists who can use them as a continuous source of data for
studying driver behavior on a long term basis. This type of research
will assist government officials and agencies to continue the
effective management of driving on a permanent basis.
 
7. Increasing people’s awareness and focusing public attention on the social
implications of car society, car talk, car attitudes and behaviors, through content
analysis of
      Accounts (or stories) drivers give when telling what happened
      Messages drivers write in electronic discussion groups
      Newspaper accounts of driving incidents and duels
      Public or media portrayals of drivers and driving (including books
and advertisings)
      Other sources that access the thoughts and feelings of people
about driving
 
Analysis of Internet Newsgroups about driving and cars with participants from
North America, Britain, Australia, and Singapore, has shown that aggressive and
hostile attitudes among drivers is universal and transcends ethnic background
(James, 2000).  The psychological mechanisms that justify this hostility may vary
from culture to culture. It is necessary therefore to develop culture-specific
methods of social influence to bring about a change in norms of competition and
hostility.
 
8. Building inventories and taxonomies of affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor
driving behaviors to guide scientists and safety officials, and to help define the
content of public instruction and other educational materials for self-improvement
efforts. Current inventories of driving behaviors in North America have been
obtained through various methods, including:
      surveys or polls using driver behavior check lists (James, 1998)
      content analysis of driving accounts (personal stories and media
reports) (James and Nahl, 2000)
      protocol analysis of transcripts of tape recordings made by drivers
behind the wheel (self-witnessing method) (James, 1987)
      observations made by passengers and pedestrians
      data gathered with specially equipped research vehicles
      data gathered from driving simulators
 
9. Supporting and promoting civic activism and social organizations that focus on
driving and the car culture, e.g.,
      groups focusing on aggressive driving prevention for children

23
       groups identifying themselves as citizens against drunk driving or
speeding
      designated driver programs to fight alcohol related driving fatalities
      youth against road rage organizations (James, 1998)
      public procedures for recognizing driver excellence (awards,
certificates, nominations)
      creating and supporting positive driving roles and heroes (e.g.,
DrDriving—the Musical, and other culturally integrated symbols of
collectivist driving through music, drama, and dance)
      providing racing parkways and off road driving in reserved areas to
provide more acceptable alternatives to speeding and rough driving
enthusiasts
 
10   .Providing access to Driving Informatics facilities to satisfy people’s driving
information needs (Nahl, 1999):
      Driving self-improvement workbooks and curricula
      Standard QDC Curriculum (Quality Driving Circles)
      Accident recovery support organizations
      Automotive needs (maintenance, repair, sales)
      Travel information (including maps, weather, and traffic)
      Insurance and legal
      Training and Licensing
      Aggressive driving prevention for children (James and Nahl, 1998)
      Civic organizations (traffic control, safety education, impaired
driving, legislation)
      Car culture and history
      World Wide Web activities (driving sites, newsgroups,
organizations, conferences, initiatives, news)
      Etc.
 

Basic Principles in Driving Psychology

 
These can be stated as follows:
1. Driving is a complex of behaviors acting together as cultural norms.
 
2. Driving norms exist in three domains: affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor.
 
3. Driving norms are transmitted by parents, other adults, books, movies, TV.
 
4. The primary affective driving norms for this generation are:
      valuing territoriality, dominance, and competition as a desirable
driving style

24
       condoning intolerance of diversity (in needs and competencies of
other drivers)
      supporting retribution ethics (or vigilante motives with desire to
punish or amend)
      social acceptance of impulsivity and risk taking in driving
      condoning aggressiveness, disrespect, and the expression of
hostility
       These affective norms are negative and anti-social. Socio-cultural
methods must be used to reduce the attractiveness of these
aggressive norms and to increase the attractiveness of positive and
cooperative driver roles.
 
5. The primary cognitive driving norms are:
      inaccurate risk assessment
      biased and self-serving explanations of driving incidents
      lack of emotional intelligence as a driver
      low or underdeveloped level of moral involvement (dissociation and
egotism)
       These cognitive norms are inaccurate and inadequate. Self-training
and self-improvement techniques must be taught so that drivers can
better manage risk and regulate their own emotional behavior.
 
6. The primary sensorimotor driving norms are:
      automatized habits (un-self-conscious or unaware of one’s style and
risk)
      errors of perception (e.g., distance, speed, initiating wrong action)
      lapses (in one’s attention or performance due to fatigue, sleepiness,
drugs, boredom, inadequate training or preparation)
       These sensorimotor norms are inadequate and immature. Lifelong
driver self-improvement exercises are necessary to reach more
competent habits of driving.
 
7. Driving norms and behavior can be changed by socio-cultural management
techniques that create in the driver a desire for change, by weakening negative
norms and strengthening positive norms of driving.  Since driving is a habit in
three domains of behavior, driving self-improvement is possible and effective in
improving this habit. Specific elements in each domains must be addressed in
recognition of the fact that driving consists of thousands of individual habits or
skills, each of which can be identified, tested, and improved, on a long term
basis.
 
8. Drivers maintain strong resistance to externally imposed restrictions and
regulations so that these methods alone are not sufficient to create real changes
in driver behavior. Socio-cultural methods of influence need to be used, such as
QDCs (Quality Driving Circles).  Driving Psychology uses socio-cultural methods

25
 that act as change agents. Group dynamic forces are powerful influencing agents
that can overcome drivers’ resistance to change. This is achieved by group
activities that focus on this resistance in an explicit way, and afterwards, are put
into conscious practice through follow up self-witnessing activities behind the
wheel. These informal groups are called QDCs (Quality Driving Circles) and their
function is to exert a long term or permanent socio-moral influence on the driving
quality of its members. This positive influence is exerted by members on each
other when they adhere to a Standard QDC Curriculum, as approved by
designated safety officials or agencies on a regional or national basis. The QDC
Curriculum is created through the principles of driving psychology.
 
9. Driving is a semi-conscious activity since much of it depends on automatized
habits acquired through culture and experience over several years. Thus, the
driver’s self-assessment is not objective or accurate, until trained in objective
self-assessment procedures.
 
10. Driving inherently involves taking risks, making errors, and losing emotional self-
control. Thus, drivers need to be trained in risk taking, error recovery, and
emotional control under emergency or provocation conditions.
 
11. Obtaining a driver’s license cannot be considered the end of driver training.
Continued driver training in the form of guided lifelong self-improvement activities
is essential for acquiring new skills. These new skills are needed as driving gets
more complex with technology such as managing car audio devices , reading
maps on screens , using computers , note taking , talking on phone or radio ,
keeping to a schedule , eating, etc.  The Standard QDC Curriculum (Quality
Driving Circles) needs to be kept up-dated continuously and the latest additions
are to be made available to all functioning QDCs in a region. These up-dates are
to focus on new developments that technology brings to vehicles and roads, all of
which require the acquisition of new skills by drivers.
 

Applied Programs and Techniques

 
Driving Psychology is an applied field that creates a popular language of behavioral
thinking about driving as a societal issue. This issue is complex and overlaps with
technical and non-technical intellectual environments. The language and ideas in driving
psychology are scientifically sound and accurate. However, it is not a basic science like
psychology and does not follow its rigor in application. The theory and concepts of
driving psychology can freely be borrowed from existing fields of study:
      social psychology (e.g., schemas, scripts, attribution error,
territoriality, etc.)
      developmental psychology (e.g., stages of moral development,
moral IQ, etc.)
      health psychology (e.g., resistance to compliance, addictive
behaviors, lifestyle management)

26
       applied psychology (e.g., driving behavioral, risk homeostasis,
ergonomics of errors, etc.)
      traffic psychology (driver management, pedestrian behavior, traffic
safety education, etc.)
      clinical psychology (behavior self-modification of maladaptive
habits, etc.)
      traffic sociology (e.g., social conventions on highways, attitudes
towards laws, etc.)
      automotive medicine (e.g., seat belt and child restraint use, effect of
cars on health, etc.)
      transportation engineering (traffic calming devices, alternative
transportation initiatives, etc.)
      accident reconstruction
      and others.
 
The language of driving psychology is adapted to specific populations and purposes.
Driving psychology principles and programs are cast in a popularized but scientific
language that is suitable for people of different educational level, age, and experience.
In order for driver management programs to be effective, the drivers involved must be
motivated to cooperate on their own. The desire for cooperation must stem from their
understanding and acceptance. Understanding must be instructed, and acceptance
must be won. The less perception of coercion, the greater the need for voluntary
compliance, which depends on adequate understanding. Internal motivation for lifelong
driver self-improvement is effective and dependable, but externally imposed rules are
less effective and dependable.
 
The concepts and methods of driving psychology have to be clear to the drivers or
trainees involved. Driving psychology maintains an internal rhetoric of persuasion
designed to empower drivers to overcome their spontaneous inner resistance to its
principles. It is to be expected that drivers will experience feelings of resistance to the
principles of driving psychology. A major reason is that driving psychology involves self-
assessment and self-modification, both of which are painful to most people. There is a
natural and predictable resistance to changing automatized habits in the sensorimotor
domain. There is resistance to changing cognitive norms of evaluating and judging other
drivers. There is resistance to giving up affective norms of hostility and self-
assertiveness as a driver. Driving psychology predicts the forms of the internal
resistance and provides drivers with socio-cultural methods they can use for
overcoming their own internal resistance to change.
 

The Future of Driving

 
Driving Psychology is now in the beginning stages and is still evolving in content and
method, in response to the new need for managing driving behavior in an industrialized
society. The goal of driving psychology is to reverse the natural trend of escalating
accidents that occur with a sharp increase in the number of drivers and miles driven.

27
The escalation of accidents, injuries, and their financial cost is a preventable
phenomenon, but it requires socio-cultural interventions by government, social
agencies, and citizen organizations. It is not preventable or containable by law
enforcement methods alone because these are external coercion mechanisms that
have only a limited effect. Drivers will revert to aggressive driving styles when detection
by police can be avoided. Compliance is dependent on surveillance.
 
On the other hand, it is possible to use internal methods of managing drivers’ attitudes,
emotions, and habits of thinking in order to influence the norms of driving in a society or
region. Driving psychology provides the theory and methods for creating this type of
internal influence by securing the voluntary cooperation and support of drivers for
lifelong self-improvement activities. These internal methods are fully effective in the long
run since they are incorporated into the personality and moral philosophy of each driver.
Internal influence cannot be coerced since drivers can fake attitudes and can
momentarily comply during inspection or testing. As soon as surveillance is withdrawn
or eluded, the negative attitude asserts itself in freedom. Therefore, internal influence is
possible only through the voluntary cooperation of each individual. This voluntary
cooperation can be engineered by means of the social influencing process that naturally
occurs in small groups like the Quality Driving Circles (QDCs). Long term QDC
membership erodes people's natural resistance to habit change and builds enthusiasm
for practicing collectivist and supportive driving scripts, schemas, roles, and norms
(James and Nahl, 1997)
 
In addition, the new driving norms that these socio-cultural methods create in
each community, are then spontaneously adopted from their parents by the current
generation of children who will form the next wave of drivers in the region. The new,
more supportive driving norms, along with more collectivist expectations about traffic,
can be expected to have long term benefits to both the individual and society. It has
been observed that individualistic and competitive expectations lead drivers to be
aggressive and hostile towards other road users. This aggressive frame of mind can
generalize to other interactive settings such as the workplace and the family, creating
higher stress and greater conflict. Similarly, the more supportive and collectivist
expectations can be expected to generalize to other social settings, creating less stress
and conflict, and more satisfaction and calmness throughout one's daily round of
activities. Thus, driving psychology is also a health-enhancing practice.
 
Driving psychology can draw on the methodology used in allied fields such as behavior
management techniques for self-modification (Watson and Tharp, 1985) and rational-
emotive integration (Ellis and Grieger, 1977).  As well, group dynamic techniques for
engineering new generational norms (James, 1997b) and developing moral and social
intelligence (Kohlberg, 1976; Goleman, 1995).  The lifelong driver self-improvement
curriculum is grounded in the behavioral self-assessment of driving habits (skills and
errors) within the driver's threefold self (affective, cognitive, sensorimotor).  This feature
can be used in self-assessment as well as in setting standards for testing, licensing, and
rewarding or punishing (socially, economically, and legally). The behavioral self-
assessment data generated by QDCs can be collected in national databases allowing

28
scientists to construct behavioral maps of driving by region and demographic
variables.  These maps provide statistical information on the internal world of drivers
such as the relative distribution of negative emotions in a region over time.  I estimate
that there are about 10 billion negative mini-interactions (lasting just a couple of
seconds) that occur annually between the 125 million drivers who are daily on the road
in the U.S.  The behavioral self-assessment feature of QDCs can provide a
representative sample of these interactions for accurate appraisal of the quality of
driving life, and its regional monitoring by scientists and government
agencies.  QDC members produce these behavioral self-assessment records as a
by-product of the baseline-intervention method of their self-modification
plan.  Part of the quality of life of a city, state, or region may be the driving climate
as measured by the annual number of supportive vs. aggressive exchanges one has
there.  Theoretically it should be possible to devise zoning or traffic claming
methods that make use of driving behavior maps for particular regions or segments
of a highway, by adjusting regulations to fit the driving norms, or by special
initiatives targeting troublesome behaviors by a rebellious minority.
 

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Appendix A:  Additional Entries for the Taxonomy

The 18 Behavioral Zones of Driving (see Table 3)

Note: This Table is further charted and explained in this article.

 

Level 3 (highest)  

AFFECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY  
+A3 (7) Altruism and Morality
      Applying a moral or religious precept to one's own driving actions, thoughts,
and impulses.
      Being fearful of causing injury or damage to someone.
      Caring about others' feelings.
      Wanting to be supportive and helpful to other highway users.
      Putting community and teamwork principles ahead of selfishness or competition
in traffic
      Seeing driving as involving the human rights of others on the road
      Etc.
vs.
LACK OF AFFECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY

32
 -A3 (16) Egotism and Deficient Conscience
      Feeling vengeful or wanting to injure other highway users.
      Wanting to retaliate against others.
      Ignoring the feelings and rights of other highway users.
      Denying one's guilt or feeling hostile when told of one's faulty actions.
      Ignoring the comfort and safety of passengers.
      Denying that driving behavior reflects one's character
      Etc.
COGNITIVE RESPONSIBILITY
+C3 (8) Positive Dramatizations and Mental Health
      Accurately predicting the consequences of one's driving actions or those of
others.
      De-dramatizing or neutralizing one's negative feelings in a driving situation.
      Making up emotionally intelligent driving scenarios that are protective of people
and property.
      Being able to analyze driving scenarios in terms of the sequence of decisions
by the interactants
      Using facts (such as accident rates) to re-assert one's commitment to safe
driving.
      Etc.
 
vs.
LACK OF COGNITIVE RESPONSIBILITY
-C3 (17) Negative Dramatizations and Madness
      Making up subjective or self-serving driving scenarios.
      Attaching game-like symbolic significance to driving exchanges (e.g., being
overtaken is a loss of face).
      Imagining that one is being personally singled out as the object of attack or
condemnation by other drivers (this is seldom the case).
      Denigrating or demeaning drivers for their physical appearance or that of their
car.
      Imagining that you are isolated in your car as in your own castle.
      Etc.
SENSORIMOTOR RESPONSIBILITY  
+S3 (9) Enjoyment and Satisfaction
      Enjoying the drive, the scenery, the precise and controlled movements of the
vehicle
      Experiencing a heightened sense of consciousness and relaxed good feeling
during driving (called "Zen driving")
      Engaging in productive mental work while driving such as reflection, planning,
making resolutions.
      Maintaining a good mood while driving.
      Expressing appreciation for the good things in driving (comfort, convenience

33
 beauty, importance)
      Etc.
vs.
LACK OF SENSORIMOTOR RESPONSIBILITY
-S3 (18) Stress and Depression
      Letting a despondent mood or lack of energy influence one's driving for the
worse.
      Experiencing loss of self-esteem when observing one's own driving errors
      Feeling agitated, anxious and stressed while driving.
      Driving in a physically impaired state due to alcohol, drugs, or sleep deprivation
      Etc.

Level 2  

AFFECTIVE SAFETY
+A2 (4) Defensiveness and Fairness or Equity
      Striving to be fair to other highway users.
      Wanting to avoid holding up other drivers or interfering with their goals.
      Maintaining a prudent orientation towards the potential errors of other highway
users.
      Etc.
vs.  
LACK OF AFFECTIVE SAFETY
-A2 (13) Aggressiveness and Opportunism
      Being motivated by a competitive impulse to get ahead of other drivers.
      Feeling angry or judgmental towards highway users.
      Feeling intimidated or stigmatized by the actions of other drivers.
      Wanting the pressure or coerce other drivers.
      Etc.
COGNITIVE SAFETY  
+C2 (5) Objective Attributions
      Making up emotionally intelligent explanations for the intentions or behaviors of
other highway users.
      Giving objective reasons for one's driving actions or feelings.
      Seeing things through the eyes or perspective of other highway users.
      Analyzing a driving situation to make sense of what's going on.
      Etc.
vs.
LACK OF COGNITIVE SAFETY
-C2 (14) Subjective Attributions
      Making up prejudiced, unfounded or presumptive explanations for others'
driving behavior.

34
      Misinterpreting the causes of one's own driving actions or justifying one's faulty
behavior.
      Attributing to others the cause of one's own frustrations in a driving situation.
      Finding a personal justification for doing the wrong thing (e.g., speaking or
failing to yield when in a hurry).
      Etc.
SENSORIMOTOR SAFETY
+S2 (6) Polite Exchanges and Calmness
      Remaining calm and resisting pressure in the face of provocation.
      Recovering quickly after becoming upset with another driver.
      Inhibiting aggressive or denigrating gestures or words against other highway
users or passengers.
      Etc.
vs.  
LACK OF SENSORIMOTOR SAFETY
-S2 (15) Rude Exchanges and Overreaction
      Insulting other highway users or passengers in words or gestures.
      Overreacting to another driver's rude behavior.
      Complaining about other highway users or denigrating (bad-mouthing) them.
      Pressuring or coercing another highway user or passenger.
      Etc.

Level 1 (lowest)  

AFFECTIVE PROFICIENCY
+A1 (1) Respect for Regulations and Self-Confidence
      Striving to be accurate and to avoid making errors in driving.
      Having a sense of respect for traffic regulations and authority.
      Being patient or self-controlled while waiting at traffic lights, stop signs, or traffic
flow delays.
      Gaining self-confidence in one's driving.
      Etc.
vs.  
LACK OF AFFECTIVE PROFICIENCY
-A1 (10) Disrespect for Authority and Lack of Self-Confidence
      Feeling dislike for traffic regulations or authority figures, including police and
traffic officials.
      Experiencing frustration and insecurity in a routine driving situation.
      Feeling impatient at the pace of traffic.
      Feeling too scared to drive
      Etc.
COGNITIVE PROFICIENCY  

35
 +C1 (2) Knowledge and Awareness
      Learning and memorizing driving principles and facts.
      Observing or noting one's mistakes in driving and those of other drivers.
      Becoming more aware of one's driving actions, thoughts, and feelings.
      Realizing how one's driving behaviors is influenced by mood and environment.
      Mentally rehearsing correct action sequences or principles of good driving.
      Etc.
vs.
LACK OF COGNITIVE PROFICIENCY
-C1 (11) Untrained and Faulty Thinking
      Deciding to watch out for police instead of slowing down.
      Believing it is safer to speed than to drive at speed limits.
      Deciding that it's always alright to drive 10 to 15 miles above the speed limit.
      Assuming that there is no legal speed limit somewhere (e.g., parking lots).
      Believing one is in the wrong when actually doing the right thing.
      Assuming one doesn't need lifelong driver education or constant improvement
in one's driving.
      Etc.
SENSORIMOTOR PROFICIENCY
+S1 (3) Correct Actions and Alertness
      Performing correct actions in routine driving situations.
      Paying attention to signs and being alert to other highway users.
      Keeping up with traffic
      Using self-regulatory sentences as reminders for better self-control and
alertness.
      Etc.  
vs.
LACK OF SENSORIMOTOR PROFICIENCY
-S1 (12) Faulty Actions and Inattention
      Executing an incorrect or illegal act in a routine driving situation.
      Driving with insufficient concentration or with a sense of distraction.
      Not noticing signs or being insufficiently alert to traffic conditions.
      Etc.
 
Note: This Table is further charted and explained in this article.

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