I remember a few years back before i got back on the bike, I was driving to Stafford. I saw a cyclist and i realised id by on his tail on a blind corner, so i held back and maintained his pace and overtook when the coast was clear after the corner. Cars behind were furious with my decision, pipping and flashing their headlights, confirming to me they would at least pass part of their MOT, but the cyclist put his thumb up and waved. How bad have things gotten that a cyclist thanks me for doing what i thought was normal and what i have always done. It's the wild west out there on a bike at times...
That reminds me of an occasion when a girl in a small hatchback pulled in behind me whilst an oncoming car passed. Surmising, the car behind her must have thought "WTF is she slowing down for" then pulled out to overtake, and the first I knew of it was when the two cars screeched to a halt nose to nose right beside me, and I disappeared in a cloud of rubbery smoke.
It's all part of a much wider impact of social attitudes to the car. Walkers wider study on "car brain" or as the study calls it motonormativity.
Walker believes the car is rewiring the brain to accept the risks around its use.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Motornomativity,_How_Social_Norms_Hide_a_Major_Public_Health_Hazard.pdf
I'm less impressed by that.
The study seeks to compare the same decisions in two different forms: one car related and the other not, and their conclusion rests on the equivalence of the two forms of the questions:
"we devised five simple questions about motoring and then changed one or two key words in each so that we had a parallel set of questions where the underlying principle was identical, but now referred to a non-motoring context", but looking at the questions, all but one of them clearly aren't equivalent. There's a failure to appreciate that risk taking is like any other decision: it's a cost benefit analysis, people will do something if the benefits outweight the costs, and avoid it if they don't.
Taking each of the questions:
The bias in this question is that most people would think it's irrational to walk off and leave a valuable in the street and walk off if it's portable enough to carry. Clearly these two acts are not anything like equivalent, so it's hardly surprising if the answers differ widely.
There's a bias in the question here because the type of work is not specified, is it sitting in an office or something like a steeplejack? If the type of activity you're comparing drivng with is left to the subjects' imagination, you can't know what basis they're making their decisions on.
Here, it's highly likely that people place more value on mobility and independence than on smoking and drinking, in which case they'll be quite willing to countenance more risk in return for the additional benefit.
Finally, I think this question is a lot closer to being equivalent, at least the cost is related to health & safety in both cases, and the benefit is related to business profitability in each, and as a result the answers are very similar.
The authors note that
"in most cases, people responded the same whether or not they were themselves drivers", which you might expect if the difference in the questions is not due to the car, as assumed.
Whilst I don't dispute that motornormativity exists, the study clearly doesn't demonstrate it in the way that's claimed.
