What Turns Us Into Highway Jerks? : City Smart / How to thrive in the urban environment of Southern California

Anyone who’s had driver’s training or attended traffic school in the past three decades knows the story of Good Goofy/Bad Goofy--the Disney dog who shows how otherwise decent, God-fearing, baby-loving people can turn into maniacal jerks when they climb behind the wheel.

And odds are, as you hit the road this weekend, you will encounter a few Bad Goofys, although you might choose to call them other names. While the natural reaction is to wish these turkeys into a sound wall, experts say it is best just to let them be. Or to paraphrase Proverbs: “Turn wrath away.”

It might help you turn the other cheek if you consider that the guy leaning on his horn behind you or the woman letting you know she thinks you’re No. 1 may not be just jerks. They may be working through an identity crisis.

At least that’s what Nelson Thall thinks. Thall, research director of the McLuhan Center for Media Sciences in Toronto, studies why people do what they do when they drive and has come to the conclusion that driving, like art, can be a form of expression.

“People who are frustrated in their everyday lives take out a lot of their aggressions on the road,” Thall said. “Driving is one of the few outlets where you can be an individual. You can honk your horn and be dangerous and violent.”

It helps to understand Thall’s definition of violence. He is not suggesting that driving is violent in the traditional sense--although nowadays it can be. Violence to Thall is a quest for identity and can take many non-physical forms, including driving.

“Slang is a form of social violence,” he said. “And sports. We don’t have a lot of outlets for being legally violent, so these become very important ways of getting rid of our hostilities.”

So if we feel like faceless Joes in grim button-down jobs, at least the drive home affords us the opportunity to take control. We cut people off. We refuse to let others merge. We honk. We gesture. We swear. And somewhere in all of that, we get closer to who we are.

“The car makes us feel like a somebody,” Thall said.

But it also makes us feel like a nobody. Patricia Waller, director of the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan, said she thinks the automobile can act as a cloak or mask.

“Under those circumstances, people will do things they would not normally,” Waller said. “The highway is the ultimate in anonymity. If we had our names plastered in big letters all over our car, I think we would all drive a little more courteously.”

Like Thall and Waller, the California Highway Patrol suggests that the best way to deal with highway jerks is to let them slide. And when another driver catches you acting like a jerk, the best response may be a sheepish shrug to defuse the situation.

Rarely does a defiant finger soothe bruised egos. It often can make matters worse.

“A little bit of rudeness can trigger a whole lot of rudeness,” Waller said. In the same way, though, a little bit of kindness can be contagious. Who has not had their morning commute turn sunny when the kid in the next car waves and smiles or the woman in the slow lane lets you merge?

Those sorts of drivers may be few and far between, but Thall said they become more common in times of crisis. For example, Thall pointed to a study he conducted during the Gulf War. By observing traffic from the air and from the ground in a number of U.S. metropolitan areas, Thall concluded that drivers were actually more courteous to each other as U.S. jets were bombing Baghdad.

“People got so much of their aggression out against the Iraqis that their behavior and speeds all changed,” Thall said. “When they got into their cars, they all drove very peacefully. It was absolutely amazing how the patterns changed for that period of one or two weeks.”

Closer to home, many drivers commented how courteous others were immediately after the Northridge earthquake. Not much later, though, the novelty of togetherness waned and we reverted to our old ways.

Thall suggested that it was almost inevitable as we sought to “retrieve individual identity” and define ourselves anew.

Translation: Our inner Good Goofy lost out yet again to our inner Bad Goofy.