> In a representative sample of Finnish car owners (N = 1892) we connected the Five‐Factor Model personality dimensions to driving a high‐status car. Regardless of whether income was included in the logistic model, disagreeable men and conscientious people in general were particularly likely to drive high‐status cars. The results regarding agreeableness are consistent with prior work that has argued for the role of narcissism in status consumption. Regarding conscientiousness, the results can be interpreted from the perspective of self‐congruity theory, according to which consumers purchase brands that best reflect their actual or ideal personalities. An important implication is that the association between driving a high‐status car and unethical driving behaviour may not, as is commonly argued, be due to the corruptive effects of wealth. Rather, certain personality traits, such as low agreeableness, may be associated with both unethical driving behaviour and with driving a high‐status car.
There is also this...interesting sentence in the paper's discussion section:
> The present study was motivated by the authors' everyday experience of most traffic violations being committed by male drivers of high‐status cars.
Now I am curious if this generalizes outside of Finland, or is just another of those things that serves as a marker in Nordic countries, but perhaps not in southern European ones, the Americas, or elsewhere.
Disagreeable people get what they want in the short term, but they hamper themselves in the long run.
When you're disagreeable, people will tend give you what you want to get you out of their hair, but in parallel to that, their minds begin forming ideas about how to avoid or minimize future interactions with you.
And that's going to have the effect of you not getting what you want from those people any more; you will have find new people to get what you want.
People also talk: if you're disagreeable to someone, that will not remain a secret that is just between you and then. They will likely be sharing their experience with others, which will warn those others about interacting with you.
So, if we take that into account, being disagreeable no longer seems like a clear-cut optimization of getting what you want as a long-term strategy.
Thus, although the "squeaky wheel gets a greasing", we also have it that "you catch more flies with honey".
I don't think this is necessarily true. I've seen plenty of disagreeable people making it much further than their "nicer" counterparts over a longer period of time. In business, politics, etc.
That's because they usually have money, connections and resources. A homeless disagreeable person isn't going anywhere in life.
Disagreeable only works when you have leverage.
> Disagreeable people get what they want in the short term, but they hamper themselves in the long run.
From what I understand "agreeableness" is personality dimension where people tend to sacrifice their immediate well being for long term gains for others on one side and the inability to sacrifice the same for the same. This, of course, is subject to their intelligence and ability to monitor and change their own behavior.
One can be low on agreeableness and get along well with others.
> less empathy, they are more disagreeable, and they are more willing to fight
In other words, it's a period of high job growth. I've noticed this in my dad and many men - when they have a job, they are like this. Women have it too, but there is less ego driving the entirety of their personality.
maybe it's a time of high job stress, I know when I'm stressed or going through a miserable time (and I mean exceptionally stressing, exceptionally miserable) I have less empathy - especially for anyone making time even a tiny bit less easy than it could be because I am already going through a lot - I am less agreeable because I am miserable tired and pissed off about the stuff I'm going through, and I want to punch the first person who gets in my face.
> BMWs, SUVs, and Teslas are usually more aggressive to others on the road
I've never heard this stereotype of Tesla drivers. I normally associate aggressive driving (and not signalling) with really big, high above the ground cars and trucks.
In Ohio I find Tesla's to be some of the slowest drivers. I am constantly on their ass on the on ramps. It infuriates me cause I know they could accelerate faster than everyone else around them.
The cheapest worn out beater I could find. I can get up to freeway speed, but I need my foot all the way to the floor for the entire on ramp. When sports cars (always sports cars) with great acceleration don't accelerate until the very end they make it so I'm the one trying to merge at 30 mph (50km/h).
My car isn't my status symbol. My bank account is enough that I don't worry about downturns too much and I'll be able to retire to a nice life in the future (assuming civilization doesn't collapse)
This is my experience as well just a bit north of you (Michigan). I always see Teslas in the middle lanes driving at more consistent speeds than others on the road. I figured it was because most of them are using autopilot.
The Tesla thing probably depends on where you are. If you have a lot of people driving the high-end models, that would match up with the assertion. If you’re in a middle class area with mostly model 3s, then you might have a more reasonable experience.
I find Prius drivers to be disproportionally bad when it comes to not stopping at stop signs. In terms of merging aggression, big vehicles seem to be the worst, presumably because they know other cars are going to get out of their way.
I'm not defending Prius drivers here, though I used to be one. I will say, by way of mitigation, that when you have real-time information on the energy required to overcome inertia, coming to a stop is painful. If every car had the dashboard indicators a Prius does, we would have a lot of public pressure to replace stop signs and stoplights with traffic circles/roundabouts.
I drive a plugin hybrid so get what you mean. But there's regenerative braking, which mitigates the perceived startup effect you refer to.
Also, if a bunch of cars make rolling stops, then the vehicles behind them keep crawling along the whole time (instead of coming to a complete stop and having the engine cut). I wonder what the cumulative effect is?
The Prius doesn't have an indicator of how much mitigation regenerative braking provides, but my Fiat 500e does. It's lower than I would have hoped. I get it, but I'm watching the display read -8KW when braking, but 40KW when accelerating from a stop. Acceleration takes longer, too. A complete stop is even more painful now!
Most stop signs should be replaced with nothing. The uncontrolled intersection is safer in most cases (in part because nobody has the right away so everybody takes care), uses less energy (see the Prius response), and makes the few cases where a full stop is required for some reason more obvious so drivers are more likely to stop.
You can't harshly penalize people for simply being disagreeable, and we already have traffic laws.
Many academic papers have been written on correlations between old age and bad driving. Yet when The Star writes about those papers, it chooses to blame the "transportation gap."
"Competitive people" is a bizarre description of the article's subjects: people who drive dangerously, break safety laws, and sometimes cause other people to die.
I only read the Star piece, not the study, but I'm surprised there's no mention of the theory that men who can afford nice cars are less likely to find a ticket economically meaningful. (This doesn't explain the gender gap, I admit)
I imagine wage disparity b/t men and women is part of it: I'd bet more men drive luxury cars than women b/c more men than women are paid enough to afford them.
One benefit of driving a piece of junk is that when one of these people is riding your bumper, you can tap your brakes without fear because they have much more to lose than you do.
I do it out of prudence. The routes I take going to-and-from work often require sudden stops as you hit traffic bottlenecks. I'd rather force them to back up now while I have room to avoid an actual collision, than be rear-ended later when I have to brake.
How could they prove you were break checking? It seems like it would be easy to lie and say you thought you saw something running across the road and hit the brakes just in case it was a kid or something. Plus tailgating is also illegal, which their dashcam footage would prove
Which means both of you would get a ticket/citation/fine/etc instead of just one of you.
Brake checking was a popular thing to do in my state before dashcams were so popular and affordable (assumes the person behind is at fault, but brake checking is also illegal). Someone with money is clearly able to afford dashcams, hence, don't brake check rich people thinking "they have more to lose than I do" because you just think it's only your car that's at stake.
In the UK in general, you run into the back of someone, it is your fault in the eyes of the insurers. If you hit someone due to them brake checking, you were driving too close.
This is my internal logic too. Although upon some quick Googling I was surprised to find that in the U.S. it's a legal gray-area which varies from state to state.
I drive a stick - I can slow down fast without touching my brakes just by changing to the wrong gear. I've done this by mistake more than once - I'm not enough of a jerk to do this intentionally but it is a real situation that drivers behind me better be ready for.
Why just men though? Anyone can be disagreeable and plenty of people who drive nice cars are not men. Can't tell you how many non-male tesla and BMW drivers cut me off without a signal.
Anecdote incoming: In South Seattle, it definitely isn't just "white men in fancy cars" that are doing the most dangerous of driving.
My guess is that the higher the loan value is when compared to the driver's income, the worse the driver will be. Ex: $20k/yr guy driving $45k loan V8 Mustang would be a much worse driver than $100k/yr guy who owns his BMW outright.
Side-note: I do not drive a luxury car, for those about to presume.
...in Finland. It would be interesting to know how car-buying behaviors (and brand popularity) differ across countries and cultures. Might be the same all over the world, or it could be very different. But why wait to find out, when you can put up an overbroad headline and get lots of clicks now?
> The link between conscientious personality traits and interest in high-status cars was found among both men and women. In contrast, the connection between self-centred personality traits and high-status cars was only found among men, not women. Lönnqvist has no clear answer as to why this is the case.
Here's an idea -- because it's all p-hacked nonsense.
The abstract leaves out 1) how this population of 1892 was acquired. 2) what the definition of a high status car is -- is it equivalent to the cost or is it an arbitrary split on make/model? 3) the actual statistical tests and their results. While we see N at 1892, what were the sub-populations. Presumably N[high_status] is low relative to N, which would go along way to explaining the high 'conscientious' result -- that they are both meaningless statistical artifacts.
> The present study was motivated by the authors' everyday experience of most traffic violations being committed by male drivers of high‐status cars.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard Feynman
54 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] thread> In a representative sample of Finnish car owners (N = 1892) we connected the Five‐Factor Model personality dimensions to driving a high‐status car. Regardless of whether income was included in the logistic model, disagreeable men and conscientious people in general were particularly likely to drive high‐status cars. The results regarding agreeableness are consistent with prior work that has argued for the role of narcissism in status consumption. Regarding conscientiousness, the results can be interpreted from the perspective of self‐congruity theory, according to which consumers purchase brands that best reflect their actual or ideal personalities. An important implication is that the association between driving a high‐status car and unethical driving behaviour may not, as is commonly argued, be due to the corruptive effects of wealth. Rather, certain personality traits, such as low agreeableness, may be associated with both unethical driving behaviour and with driving a high‐status car.
There is also this...interesting sentence in the paper's discussion section:
> The present study was motivated by the authors' everyday experience of most traffic violations being committed by male drivers of high‐status cars.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31797376
Disagreeable people tend to get what they want more often. The most disagreeable people tend to be men.
Also luxury car drivers tend to be worse drivers just by driving those cars alone.
https://clark.com/cars/study-expensive-cars-road-manners/
When you're disagreeable, people will tend give you what you want to get you out of their hair, but in parallel to that, their minds begin forming ideas about how to avoid or minimize future interactions with you.
And that's going to have the effect of you not getting what you want from those people any more; you will have find new people to get what you want.
People also talk: if you're disagreeable to someone, that will not remain a secret that is just between you and then. They will likely be sharing their experience with others, which will warn those others about interacting with you.
So, if we take that into account, being disagreeable no longer seems like a clear-cut optimization of getting what you want as a long-term strategy.
Thus, although the "squeaky wheel gets a greasing", we also have it that "you catch more flies with honey".
From what I understand "agreeableness" is personality dimension where people tend to sacrifice their immediate well being for long term gains for others on one side and the inability to sacrifice the same for the same. This, of course, is subject to their intelligence and ability to monitor and change their own behavior.
One can be low on agreeableness and get along well with others.
In other words, it's a period of high job growth. I've noticed this in my dad and many men - when they have a job, they are like this. Women have it too, but there is less ego driving the entirety of their personality.
This bad and unsafe behavior by these drivers is usually more pronounced toward a pedestrian or cyclist.
I've never heard this stereotype of Tesla drivers. I normally associate aggressive driving (and not signalling) with really big, high above the ground cars and trucks.
Really? Tesla drivers are like 2% tech enthusiasts and 90% the kind of people seeking the latest and greatest flashy car.
My car isn't my status symbol. My bank account is enough that I don't worry about downturns too much and I'll be able to retire to a nice life in the future (assuming civilization doesn't collapse)
For reference, I live near Palo Alto.
That said, come to a freaking stop.
Also, if a bunch of cars make rolling stops, then the vehicles behind them keep crawling along the whole time (instead of coming to a complete stop and having the engine cut). I wonder what the cumulative effect is?
Many academic papers have been written on correlations between old age and bad driving. Yet when The Star writes about those papers, it chooses to blame the "transportation gap."
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/10/24/transportation-g...
The root article of this thread is just a bunch of virtue signaling nonsense that falls under the umbrella of a cultural attack on men.
Don't be disingenuous.
Brake checking was a popular thing to do in my state before dashcams were so popular and affordable (assumes the person behind is at fault, but brake checking is also illegal). Someone with money is clearly able to afford dashcams, hence, don't brake check rich people thinking "they have more to lose than I do" because you just think it's only your car that's at stake.
Being rich is directly correlated with a loss of empathy, so this study is no surprise.
My guess is that the higher the loan value is when compared to the driver's income, the worse the driver will be. Ex: $20k/yr guy driving $45k loan V8 Mustang would be a much worse driver than $100k/yr guy who owns his BMW outright.
Side-note: I do not drive a luxury car, for those about to presume.
Here's an idea -- because it's all p-hacked nonsense.
The abstract leaves out 1) how this population of 1892 was acquired. 2) what the definition of a high status car is -- is it equivalent to the cost or is it an arbitrary split on make/model? 3) the actual statistical tests and their results. While we see N at 1892, what were the sub-populations. Presumably N[high_status] is low relative to N, which would go along way to explaining the high 'conscientious' result -- that they are both meaningless statistical artifacts.
> The present study was motivated by the authors' everyday experience of most traffic violations being committed by male drivers of high‐status cars.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard Feynman
This is bad work.