What's Behind Road Rage?
Being inside a car can lend a sense of anonymity, which can lead some to act out rage.
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10 Gender Differences Backed Up by Science
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Are men inherently better than women are at some skills, and vice versa? Though we tend to think otherwise -- and there are always notable exceptions -- scientific research frequently concludes that men and women excel in different areas. So what about nature versus nurture? As Diane Halpern, a professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College, said during the British Psychological Society Annual Conference last year: "We do socialize our boys and girls differently, but the contribution of biology is not zero."
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Men are better at judging person’s size based on their voice A study in the latest Biology Letters holds that "men are better than women at acoustic size judgments." This means that men have an enhanced ability to determine a person's size based on the sound of his or her voice, according to Benjamin Charlton and colleagues from the University of Sussex. The findings, conclude the authors, "lend support to the idea that acoustic size normalization, a crucial prerequisite for speech perception, may have been sexually selected through male competition."
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View Caption + #3: Men have better spatial awareness
Men possess a stronger ability to think of objects in three dimensions, helping with navigation, which was also discussed during the British Psychological Society Annual Conference. Even 3-month-old infants exhibit the sex-based behavioral difference. It could be that hunting, competitive battles and other activities conducted in the past helped to lock the skill into males.
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View Caption + #4: Women are better at locating specific items
Men often may have better spatial awareness than women do, but women are "better at remembering where things are," Halpern said. As a result, women are more likely to navigate using landmarks. While both men and women can therefore find their way to places with about equal skill, women might have an edge, since they could likely find things like missing car keys and maps first.
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View Caption + #5: Women are better at worrying
Women produce only about half as much serotonin -- a neurotransmitter linked to depression -- as men do and they have fewer transporters to recycle it, according to Karolinska Institute research. As a result, women tend to worry more. That’s not always a bad thing, as women might then possess an enhanced ability to foresee problems and plan how to handle them.
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View Caption + #6: Women detect colors better than men do
Women can detect subtle variations in color that men fail to identify, such as noting certain off-white colors versus white, Israel Abramov of CUNY’s Brooklyn College, determined a few months ago. It could be that women -- acting as gatherers -- developed improved color detection while searching for edibles. Abramov suspects that sex hormones are behind the differences, given that male sex hormones can alter development in the visual cortex.
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View Caption + #7: Men handle lack of sleep better than women do
A Duke University study found that men could tolerate sleep deprivation more than women could. This is either good or bad news for men, as sleep is involved in brain repair, when the brain sorts out memories and other information acquired throughout the day.
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View Caption + #8: We are evenly matched at multitasking
Some studies have found that men are better at multi-tasking, while others have determined just the opposite. When compiled, the data so far suggests that our multitasking skills could be evenly matched. As we age, we also tend to lose, at about the same rate, our ability to handle more than one activity at once. Older men and women exhibit more difficulty in switching between tasks at the level of brain networks, according to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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View Caption + #9: Men are better at detecting infidelity
Men appear to be better at reading subtle vocal, visual, scent and other cues indicating their partner's fidelity, concludes a study published in the journal Human Nature. The downside, said co-author Paul Andrews of Virginia Commonwealth University, is that that these cues aren’t always accurate, and men are more likely than women to falsely suspect cheating. Yet another study on cheating, published in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, found that men are more upset by sexual infidelity, and while women are more upset by emotional infidelity. Women, it should be mentioned, outperform men when identifying emotions, according to a study in the journal Neuropsychologia.
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View Caption + #10: We are evenly matched in terms of intelligence
Men tend to be larger and, as a result, tend to have bigger brains. Size, however, does not necessarily correlate with intelligence. Braininess instead relies more on neuronal connections, which we help forge when learning by experience or study. Historically, women's IQs have lagged behind those of men by up to 5 points, but now women are surpassing men in such tests. Rex Jung, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico, has found that men tend to have more brain grey matter while women have more white matter. The differences yet again are evident, but it appears that the evolutionary battle between the sexes can, at least for now, be judged as a tie.
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View Caption + #11: Women usually live longer than men
Better immunity, reduced risk for blood diseases and lower risk-taking may give women an edge on longevity. Based on Centers for Disease Control data, women tend to have a life expectancy that’s 5.3 years greater than men's, but the gap is narrowing. In 1978, it was 7.8 years. The good news for men is that they tend to remain sexually active longer than women do. "Interest in sex, participation in sex and even the quality of sexual activity were higher for men than women, and this gender gap widened with age," said Stacy Tessler Lindau of the University of Chicago, who worked on a related study.
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What drives people to take shots at other motorists from behind the wheel of a car? Aggression, territoriality and a feeling of anonymous power are the psychological ingredients of road rage, experts say.
On Wednesday, New Mexico authorities arrested a 33-year-old man and charged him with murder this week in connection with a road rage incident in which he allegedly shot and killed a 4-year-old girl who was sitting in the back seat.
Police say the violence was preventable.
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“We’re starting to see this throughout our nation,” said Albuquerque Police Chief Gordon Eden at a Wednesday news conference. “And this is something that should not be happening in Albuquerque, New Mexico, let alone anywhere else in the United States.”
Police said the girl was shot when a driver pulled up and fired into a car in which she and her 7-year-old brother were passengers in the back seat. She later died at a hospital. Her father had picked the children up from school, Eden said, and had yelled at the shooter after being cut off in a lane change.
While the specifics of the incident are still being investigated, experts say they usually arise from a perfect storm of perceived insults, stress, male aggression and the feeling that you can’t be held responsible for things you do from behind the wheel of a car.
“This about a sense of power and anonymous power behind the wheel,” said Steve Albrecht, a security consultant and former San Diego Police officer who has written about the causes of road rage. “If you look at the anonymous nature people have in a car, then mix in male aggression, they believe they can do what they want with no consequences.”
Albrecht added that violence is usually a young man’s game.
“There’s a territoriality that young men get,” he said. “That comes from immaturity also the anonymous nature of this. You wouldn’t be able to identify them.”
He said that aggression, combined with easy access to firearms in many states, has fueled road rage incidents.
The actors in road rage incidents often take slights very personally, according to Emil Coccaro, chairman of the department of psychiatry at the University of Chicago who has studied the intersection of firearms and road rage.
“People with road rage respond to a threat with a bigger emotional response,” he said. “They tend to think that people are doing what they are doing to mess around with them. In fact they are doing it to get where they are going, and they are in the way.”
The solution has to come from inside, both experts say. Breathing, counting to 10, listening to music, or just refusing to care if someone beats you to a light or cuts you off are strategies to defuse road rage before it gets out of control.
“Life is not like the movies where you think you can do something and there is no consequences,” Coccaro said.
“You don’t know if the person has a gun or a golf club.”
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