A few years ago, I was driving down the highway. Another car and I tried to shift into the middle lane at the same time. The driver of the other car turned and flipped me a rude gesture, only to discover a moment later that both of us are colleagues at work. The next day, this colleague apologized, saying "Sorry, I reacted without thinking." I have reacted the same way in other circumstances, so to this point only luck has kept me from being rude to a colleague or friend.
More generally, we often react quickly to situations, acting in ways that are quite different from what we would do with a more careful and reasoned approach to the same situation. What is going on?
A lot of our thinking is driven by attempts by the cognitive system to minimize energy consumption by a particular cognitive process. The brain is about 2-3% of the body mass of an adult, but it uses up about 20% of the body's energy. So, the brain is an exceedingly costly organ to run.
Because brain function requires so much energy, the cognitive system has an interesting cost-benefit calculation to do. Consider a person making the decision about whether to make a rude gesture to another driver. On the cost side of this calculation, there is the energy cost of spending cognitive effort to think through the situation. There is also the cost that action will lead to a bad outcome (such as accidentally being rude to an associate or causing road-rage in the recipient of the splendid gesture). On the benefit side, the response has the possibility of making the driver feel good. It will also allow the individual to feel that some appropriate response was made to the driving faux pas.
In the case described at the start of this post, there is little chance that you will actually make a rude gesture to someone you know, and (these days) few people take drastic and violent action after receiving a rude gesture. So, one of the biggest costs of thinking through the situation is the energy cost of the thinking itself. Consequently, minimizing energy costs maximizes the chance that there will be benefits that exceed the cost of thinking.
The situation could be different, of course. If you are driving in a place where there are many colleagues, friends, and relatives on the road, then perhaps there are significant social costs to a rude gesture. If there is some real danger of retaliation by the other drive, then again there are significant costs. In this case, the cost of extra thinking is very small relative to the costs of a bad decision, and the benefits of a good one.
Research by Wayne Gray, Chris Sims, Wai-Tat Fu, and Michael Schoelles demonstrates that people are very good at adapting the amount of thinking they do to take into account the costs in a situation. They find that people consistently try to minimize the amount of time that they spend on choices, but that they are willing to put in effort in cases in which the choice has significant costs or where there are big differences in the benefits to be obtained from different options.
Because the cognitive system is biased to minimize the time and effort involved in thinking, the system is fallible. There will be times where a few moments of additional thought might avert a bad outcome.
So, how can you help yourself to think more carefully? This turns out to be quite tricky. Essentially, the cognitive system weighs the costs and benefits of a situation as quickly as it can as well. So, when you enter a familiar situation (like driving a car), you try to recall other situations like the one you are in and determine whether anything negative happened in the past. If you do retrieve a negative experience, then that will give you an indication that there may be significant costs to bad behavior. The presence of these costs will slow down your thinking.
One thing you can do to think more carefully, then, is to find situations in which you believe that you act rashly and impulsively. For those situations, think specifically about all of the possible consequences of bad choices of behavior. By thinking about these bad outcomes, you will make them more available in memory the next time you are in one of those situations. Retrieving those negative outcomes will increase your perception of the cost of bad actions, and that in turn will make you more likely to think carefully.
Happy thinking, and happy driving!
