Modeling Road Rage

One of my guilty pleasures is watching auto racing on television, an interest that traces back to my childhood, when my father took us to midget, sprint car and stock car races throughout the Northeast. Auto racing suffered a tragedy this month when Tony Stewart, three-time NASCAR Sprint Cup champion, driving a sprint car on a dirt track in Canandaigua, NY, ran over and killed fellow-driver Kevin Ward, Jr., who was standing on the track. The incident was unusual only by virtue of its sad ending.

In racing, it's common for contact to occur when one car passes another. It doesn't always cause a accident, but when it does, it is most often the slower car that is left spinning to the side of the track. The passing driver typically denies that the accident was intentional; his victim usually has a different interpretation. It is not unusual for the victim to exhibit signs of road rage, for example, standing on the track and yelling or shaking his fist at the other driver as he passes the scene of the accident.

On the lap prior to the fatal accident, Stewart (#14) spun out Ward's (#13) car, bringing out the caution flag. The video shows what happened next.

You can hear Stewart hit the throttle just before he drives past Ward. (The video doesn't permit us to locate the source of the sound, but eyewitnesses claim it was Stewart.) Stewart may have responded to Ward's anger with some road rage of his own. On a dirt track, drivers will sometimes deliberately spray dirt onto someone standing on or near the track. However, accelerating suddenly on dirt can cause the car to fishtail, sending its rear wheels toward the outside of the track. Stewart's right rear tire struck Ward, pulled him under the vehicle, and killed him.

Stewart's actions were reckless but almost certainly not intentional. It's doubtful that he will be prosecuted, since Ward assumed a great deal of risk by walking on the track. He may, however, suffer professional consequences, especially given his long history of on-track aggression. (For example, when Stewart was taken out in an accident he attributed to fellow NASCAR driver Matt Kenseth, he threw his helmet at Kenseth's front windshield. Later he threatened Kenseth with retaliation in a television interview.) Stewart's greatest risk will be loss of corporate sponsorship and income from television commercials.

AAA reports that aggressive driving, broadly defined, is a factor in 56% of fatal auto accidents. A 2013 article by Christine Wickens and her colleagues summarizes what is known about the causes of road rage, which they define more narrowly as aggressive actions on roadways resulting from hostility toward another driver. Since little is known, the article functions as a road map for future research. They divide the causes into personal, i.e., men exhibit more road rage than women, and situational, i.e., it occurs when aggressive intent is attributed to another driver. Not mentioned among potential causes is observational learning and imitation of the behavior of role models.

NASCAR and other racing sanctioning bodies have been quite tolerant of aggressive displays on the track, probably because they think they increase the sport's popularity. But drivers like Tony Stewart are liked and respected by racing fans, and their actions might serve to legitimize similar aggressive actions on the roadways. Are changes in the popularity of auto racing on television correlated with changes in the frequency of aggression on our highways? (NASCAR's ratings have tailed off in recent years. Has road rage also declined?)

There has been relatively little research on the effects of specific events shown or reported in the mass media. An exception is research on suicide contagion, a problem which has become timely following the death of Robin Williams. Suicides increase in the country in the week following the suicides of well-known people. The effect is greater when person who commits suicide is real rather than fictional and there is evidence suggesting that contagion is more likely to occur when there is a demographic match between the model and his or her imitator. These studies could point the way for future research on the connection between televised incidents and road rage among racing fans.

The Stewart incident has brought about at least a temporary change. NASCAR has announced that drivers will not be permitted to leave their cars following an accident until they are escorted off the track by the safety crew. (Of course, there are exceptions, such as when the vehicle is on fire.) NASCAR claims that this has always been the rule, but if so, it hasn't been enforced. If this change is permanent, it could impact not only driver safety, but audience safety as well.

Now, NASCAR, what about those threats of violence in post-race interviews?

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Situation Alarming--But Not Serious

Social Psychologists Set an Example

Sandra Bem, a feminist social psychologist and the author of gender schema theory, died May 20 at her home in Ithaca, NY, at age 69. Her husband, Daryl Bem, is also a prominent social psychologist. The following is the relevant section of her obituary.

The cause of death was suicide.

When she was diagnosed four years ago with Alzheimer's, she said she would end her life while she still could when the disease became too debilitating to continue.

After years of expensive medical treatments, she stopped all care six months ago and decided it was time to die.

She bought a copy of “The Peaceful Pill Handbook” and chose to take her life with pentobarbital.

The family held a service for her two days before her death.

“Instead of a funeral service, the family met with her last Sunday, a group gathering where we all shared our memories of her and our thoughts and feelings,” said her husband, Darly Bem, 75, also a nationally recognized psychologist. “Everyone was aware that Tuesday was the deadline.”

After spending her last day with Daryl, during which the couple went for a long walk, watched a movie and had dinner, Sandra took the drug at about 7 p.m. Tuesday and died in her sleep.

Thanks are due to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for having the courage to publish this information. I suspect some readers were not pleased.

Suicide, Homicide and Guns

There are a number of reasons social psychologists are confident that the availability of firearms is a major cause of violent death. In an earlier post, I discussed some of the many studies of the priming effect of weapons on aggression. These studies suggest that the presence of weapons, or pictures of weapons, increases aggressive thoughts and behaviors. Since these are laboratory experiments in which participants are randomly assigned to conditions, they permit a relatively strong inference of causality. However, due to the obvious constraints on our willingness to provoke aggression in the lab, some people find these studies to be artificial, and feel more comfortable with field studies of the availability of firearms in the real world.

Many of these field studies are ecological, in the sense that they measure both the availability of weapons and the number of deaths at the aggregate or population level. For example, in an early study, Archer and Gartner (1987) found that the homicide rate in countries around the world is highly correlated with the availability of handguns. But correlation does not mean causation, and the countries involved in this comparison differed in many other ways besides their weapons policy. Most recent studies have attempted to statistically control for alternative explanations such as urbanization, poverty, alcohol use, depression, etc. However, since the number of alternative explanations is theoretically infinite, there are limits to this approach.

© nypost.com

Gun advocates also attack the validity of the measures used in these studies. For example, in most studies, the availability of firearms is determined from gun registration statistics. However, it could be argued that many homicides are the result of unregistered guns in the hands of criminals. Can this assumption account for the positive correlation between gun availaility and murder? Yes, but only if you assume that those areas that contain the most legally registered guns also contain the most illegal ones.

A more time-consuming but more conservative procedure is to start with a suicide or homicide and work backward, looking at each individual case. In these observational studies, for each suicide or homicide victim, regardless of the manner of death, it is determined whether firearms were available in the home. These people are compared to a matched control group of people who did not commit suicide or were not murdered, such as participants in a national health survey. This allows you to compute a likelihood ratio—the likelihood of a homicide or suicide when a gun is available compared to the likelihood when it is not.

In a study published this week, Andrew Anglemyer of the University of California at San Francisco and his colleagues did a thorough literature search and located 15 such observational studies. They then did a meta-analysis of these data. A meta-analysis is an analysis of analyses, a way of statistically combining the results of several studies to estimate the size of an effect. These were their findings:

• You are 3.24 times more likely to commit suicide when a firearm is readily available than when it is not. These findings do not differ for men and women.

• You are 1.94 times more likely to die of a homicide with a gun in the home than without. This effect differs for male and female homicide victims. Women are 2.94 times more likely to be killed when a firearm is available, while for men, the effect is almost nil—only 1.29 times more likely.

The meta-analysis shows that having a firearm available has a greater influence on suicides than on homicides. This makes sense, because most firearm suicides kill themselves with their own gun, while most firearm homicide victims are killed with someone else's gun.

The homicide data show that firearm availability only increases the risk for female victims. Other studies show that women are most likely to be murdered by someone they know. This suggests that firearm availability makes it easier for domestic violence to become lethal. On the other hand, there is no evidence that owning a firearm increases the risk of homicide for men, since they are usually not killed with a gun belonging to themselves or a family member.

In an accompanying editorial, David Hemenway, a leading authority on firearm victimization, points out that this pattern of results is due to Anglemyer's choice to analyze only individual-level, observational studies. He argues that the meta-analysis substantially underestimates the effects of firearm availability on male homicides because it only asks whether the victim had access to a gun, when the more important question is whether the perpetrator had access to a gun. Therefore, he suggests that future studies of homicides be either population-level ecological studies which measure the number of guns in the community, or individual-level observational studies of the availability of firearms to perpetrators rather than victims.

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