Emotional pollution primes the pump for aggressive behavior. Here's how it works. Suppose you're driving down the road at a baseline level of arousal, that is, with no resentment, anger, entitlement, pettiness, sarcasm, victim identity, or enmity any kind. Suddenly an obnoxious event occurs, like someone flipping you the finger and shouting something about your mother as they speed by your car. If you're at baseline to begin with, that might get you about 30% aroused, which is no big deal. Your response will likely get no worse than sarcasm; you'll think, "What a jerk," or maybe even shout something about his mother in return. That kind of anger dissipates in a few minutes and is forgotten about completely within a couple of hours - you're not likely to remember it ever happened.
But if you get into the car primed by emotional pollution at home or at work, you're already about 30 percent aroused at the start. So that same obnoxious event isn't hitting you at baseline. Rather, it revs you up to about a 60 to 70 percent arousal level. That's where you begin to get aggressive, with a hair-trigger mechanism for escalation, should there be any negative response to your aggression. Add caffeine, nicotine, anxiety, or a startle response to the mix, and the adrenaline can easily go through the roof. This kind of anger will stay with you in various degrees for the whole day, and you'll get pissed every time you think of the incident.
My agency, CompassionPower, has offered classes for domestic violence and child abuse offender for two decades. A few years ago, we were asked to conduct court-ordered classes for aggressive drivers as well. Our work there has yielded surprising evidence of the spread of emotional pollution on our roads and highways. Of the court-ordered participants, 80% of them reported that they were caught responding in kind to being cut off, tailgated, or screamed at by other drivers. Because it was done to them, they felt justified in doing it to someone else - a classic response to emotional pollution. There's a peculiar anonymity to driving. We respond emotionally to vehicles rather than anonymous drivers whom we can't see through tinted windows or hear with our radios blaring. Because vehicles are not personal, you can play out your reactivity on any of them, not necessarily the one that offended you. So an SUV might cut you off, but you are likely to tailgate or speed by the first car that gets in your way, because it feels like you have the right. Emotional pollution makes you feel like a victim, which seems to justify almost any kind of lashing-out retaliation, at least in the moment.
If you doubt the effects of emotional pollution on your driving, try this experiment. The next time you drive at the speed limit on the highway, try to think of some occurrence at work or home that stirs up your resentment. Think about how unfair it is and how you deserve better treatment, how it should be this way or shouldn't be that way. After a minute or so, look down at the speedometer. You'll notice that you are going 15 to 20 miles per hour above the speed limit. If the traffic doesn't allow so big an increase in speed, you are likely to be tailgating, with an impulse to change lanes abruptly.
The Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration (MVA) has analyzed the driving records of some 300 people who were court-ordered to attend classes for family violence at our agency. Their analysis uncovered a strong link between aggressive driving and family violence. Fully two-thirds of the family violence offenders had multiple aggressive driving violations in the year before treatment. These are violations like tailgating, running red lights or stop signs, and unsafe lane changes - impossible to detect without the coincidental presence of a police officer. Yet the average number of convictions for these offenses by the family violence offenders was 3.4 in one year. By normal estimates of the number of infractions versus the number of times getting caught, these people were driving aggressively virtually all the time. Of course, some of the resentment that fueled their aggression started at home and went onto the road, but since most of the infractions occurred in the afternoon rush hours, a lot of it was starting at work or on the road and going home. A great many of the incidents of domestic violence and child abuse our clients reported occurred within an hour of arriving home from a stressful commute. The aggression these drivers bring home with them is exacerbated by the fact that so many of them reach for a drink or two or three once they get there, just to "unwind."
Another finding in the Maryland MVA analysis was that our family violence intervention, which never mentioned driving, reduced these aggressive violations by 98% in the year following treatment. This was three times better than a matched group of drivers ordered into standard driver improvement classes, which focused on driving skill but did not address resentment, anger, or aggression. Our classes managed to greatly reduce aggressive driving by shrinking the baseline resentment levels of our clients. Our graduates were not only driving less aggressively, they reported less resentment and strife at work, while 86% of them were free of violence one-year following treatment, based on report of the spouse-victim.
The good news here is that stricter enforcement of traffic laws, with impulse-control intervention as a consequence of violations, may prevent family violence. Conversely, raising other people's resentment on the road can lead to abuse in untold households. The great news is that being nice to the people you meet, even jerks on the road, may help prevent domestic violence or child abuse. In a very real way, we protect the safety and well being of every other driver on the road and that of their families and co-workers off the road.
One last point, the low-grade anger and resentment rampant in emotional pollution leads inevitably to aggressive driving. The physical and mental changes that occur even with low grade anger impair judgment and deteriorate fine motor skills - you are more likely to be impulsive and do things like turn the wheel too hard when resentful. Your eyes dilate slightly even with low-grade anger. This increases peripheral vision - early human predators used to attack from the side, never from the front - but at the cost of depth perception. In other words you become less accurate at judging distances, which explains why so many resentful drivers tailgate and cut off other motorists; they are actually closer than they believe. Resentment deteriorates judgment and slows reaction time. Due to the increased blood flow to the muscles during any kind of anger arousal, you are likely to drive faster than normal - it doesn't take much of an increase in blood flow to make the foot a little heavier on the gas.
