Emil Coccaro, a professor and psychiatrist at the University of Chicago, has studied Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED) for many years. People with this disorder repeatedly respond with violent or verbally aggressive outbursts, disproportionate to any given situation. (Not all road-ragers have IED, but road rage can be a symptom of it.)
The psychological root of this behavior is often something called Hostile Attribution Bias—the belief that every accidental injury or threat is purposeful, and personal. People with IED over-personalize every interaction, and then over-react with immediate aggression.
It’s a dangerous combination when this happens to someone behind the wheel of a car on the road. It’s also risky to drive carelessly in such a way that could provoke drivers like that in unpredictable ways.
A national survey found that people who drive with guns in their cars are more likely to “make obscene gestures at other motorists” and “follow aggressively behind” other cars.
Drivers make little mistakes all the time: timing things incorrectly, for instance, or accidentally going the wrong speed for whatever zone they’re in. And it’s pretty easy for those mistakes to be misinterpreted as purposeful acts of aggression, especially since there’s no type of horn-honk that says “sorry”
Unfortunately, when another driver makes a mistake, it is often difficult for him to apologize, to signal ‘excuse me’ in a way that can be readily understood. By contrast, cars provide an environment in which individuals may feel safe to display hostility. A car gives the motorist power, protection, easy escape, and anonymity. Not surprisingly, hostile behavior by motorists is relatively common.
Aggression, like depression, has biological roots as well as psychological ones. Having seratonin or dopamine levels that are off-balance have often been linked to impulsive and aggressive behavior in humans and animals.
So how can we try to prevent road rage, from the perspective of both the ragers and the road-makers?
What if we could all just take a pill? It’s very possible that anti-inflammatory drugs could also calm people’s aggressive behavior.
