Here’s why a Texas psychology professor says we’re more susceptible to road rage

Road rage and aggressive driving has appeared to climb in recent years, amplifying the need for more enforcement on freeways and roadways, experts and Dallas police say.

Statistics about road rage are difficult to record because many police agencies don’t track them or only recently started, according to The New York Times. Dallas police began to track them in 2021, and have responded to more than 600 road rage incidents by this point in 2021 and 2022.

Here’s what Art Markman, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said is important to understand about the apparent uptick in aggressive driving and road rage:

There’s a wide range of road rage reactions

Along with the lack of police data, road rage can be hard to record because it can include a disturbance that’s difficult for police to catch, such as someone yelling and speeding up their car momentarily, said Art Markman, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

The majority of road-rage incidents in Dallas have been shootings, although people have also brandished firearms or rammed their cars into other vehicles, according to police.

America has low resilience because of more stress

America is in an era where people have many sources of stress from the COVID-19 pandemic, Markman said, adding that “our watchword right now really needs to be grace.”

Markman said resilience is low nationally, so part of the reason for the uptick is “we’re not rested, we’re stressed out, and so it takes a little bit less prodding for people to lose that ability to calm themselves down.”

When someone experiences rage, it can be hard for them to control because the brain mechanism that tells someone not to do something they know they shouldn’t can be overpowered by the surge of energy in their system, he said.

There may be deadly weapons at a driver’s disposal

A driver’s road rage action depends on the tools at their disposal, Markman said. If there’s a gun in a car, it increases the accessibility of that as an action, he added.

That doesn’t mean most responsible gun owners will react badly, Markman said, but having a gun nearby makes a shooting possible.

“If all you’ve got is your voice and your hands, you’re much more likely to yell or make a gesture at a driver than anything else, ‘cause what are you gonna do?” Markman said. “Certainly having other tools at your disposal changes the range of reactions.”

Good data is hard to gather, which hurts efforts to confront road rage

With good data, officials can figure out the underlying causes of road rage and create good messaging about how drivers can calm down, Markman said. But city officials can’t fix what they can’t measure, he said.

“We can give people strategies for dealing with their anger in a more productive way, but whether it’s worth the time and effort that goes into trying to do that teaching depends on our having some better statistics about the incidents of road rage,” Markman said.