LogFAQs > #982932441

OhhhJa posted...

People are extremely easy to piss off on the road. It's like getting in a car makes people think everyone is out to get them. Smiling and waving or any sort of other benign taunt will send a lot of people into blind rage

The psychology of driving is weird. It's intrinsically a dangerous activity, which causes a lot of stress for many people, but because there's so much about how other people drive that's out of your control, you can't really do much about that stress. The physicality of driving also doesn't really lend itself to either of the usual crisis responses (can't flee because you're stuck in a metal box, can't fight because the most you can do directly is push the pedals a bit harder than usual), so there really isn't anywhere for that stress to go except to just sit there and make people angry. On top of that, the fact that it's hard to see other drivers as anything but faceless metal boxes can make it a very isolating, dehumanizing experience, where you don't necessarily feel any reservations about being angry at other drivers because it's so easy to see them as cars instead of people.

It all adds up to road rage being a lot easier to slip into than one might expect from seeing how somebody behaves outside of a car.