Social Road Rage and Cancel Culture

Two recent articles on road rage may be applicable to other situations, including especially political discourse in which tempers run hot and other people are perceived as being in the way. Bjureberg and Gross (2021) discussed the way road rage comes in various degrees and in response to various perceived and actual wrongs.

The basic formula is a driver who takes something as a personal insult that requires (in the driver’s mind) what duelists used to call “satisfaction.” The rage requires an incident, an interpretation, and a failure to regulate emotion. Yujin (2021) discussed ways to use artificial intelligence to reduce road congestion and thereby reduce the likelihood of stressful incidents.

“Social” or “political” road rage describes how political discourse turns hostile in many situations.

In all cases, the road rager experiences your behavior as an insult and, typically, is overwhelmed with righteous indignation. The actor/observer effect kicks in, and the incident is perceived not as a misstep or a situational issue but as a reflection of your character, which justifies your cancellation. Other drivers may have similar feelings or thoughts, but only the road rager responds with dangerous behavior: tailgating, pulling right in front of you at high speeds, running you off the road, refusing to let you into traffic, and so on. In psychology, the road rager adopts a strategy analogous to getting in front of you and slowing down to a crawl. Then, when you blow your horn, you are the one experienced as rageful.

Righteous indignation comes in two forms. One is righteous on behalf of the road ragers themselves (“You cannot treat me in this manner”), the other on behalf of society, where the enraged individual honks and tailgates and drives you off the road to preserve the order and harmony of the traffic culture. In psychology, people are their most vicious when they claim to be doing it to protect someone else.

This may sound familiar to anyone who lives on the verge of being canceled by speaking up. Working in academia and media, especially, is like driving on a highway with many road ragers bristling with self-righteousness. The smallest error can make them try to run you off the road and revoke your license, i.e., take your job. The hall monitors who police speech almost solely claim to be after the good of the highway community rather than activated by their petty egotisms. I have my doubts, especially when the rage is expressed publicly and the provocation is verbal.

Not too long ago (and, as far as I know, to this day), it was heresy worthy of demolition to suggest that provocations of people’s righteous indignation could be large or small. There’s a history of the powerful dismissing the powerless by calling their provocations small. Some zealots insisted that the only solution was—no, not to put aside one’s bias in assessing provocation but to consider provocations to be exactly as offensive as the emotions they evoked. That is, emotions were the measure of provocation as long as the provoked person was higher on some "Hierarchy of the Aggrieved" than the supposed offender.

When a driver’s mistake affects us, let’s generally assume the person is in an awful hurry (like having to get to a bathroom) or wasn’t paying attention rather than assuming they’re irredeemable narcissists. We can still swear a blue streak and honk, not one of those long blares but a toot that says, “Hey, I’m here.” We might also glare if the behavior seemed intentional. If the other driver makes an apologetic gesture, let’s wave and shrug it off. If the other driver refuses to make an apologetic gesture, let’s shrug it off without waving, usually after uttering further expletives. Let’s be quick to anger but slow to hate and devoid of retaliation.

I wish we could adopt these principles on the highway of life. Other people are going to make mistakes, but proportionate reactions are called for. If we really care about the culture and not about our own narcissistic injury, then we should preserve a culture of empathy, which includes angry debate and standing up to injustice but does not include convicting and sentencing people based on gossip and denunciation or overcharging their misdemeanor missteps as felonies.

I certainly think more than a toot and a glare is called for if the other driver causes actual (legal, physical, or economic) harm and not just hurt feelings. But even then, I didn’t get out of my car and scream at the woman who ran into me while looking at her phone or at the man who turned left from the right-hand lane and banged into my car. I expect, when harmed, to be compensated, but no more than that. Short of actual harm, rather than hurt feelings, it’s rarely useful to involve the authorities.

Anger Essential Reads

Did Anger Evolve to Make Us Happy?

What Fruit Flies Can Tell Us About Our Own Aggression

Our legal system (in most states) solves this problem by allowing claims for emotional distress alone only if the tortfeasor’s conduct is “extreme and outrageous” or negligently puts the plaintiff in or near physical danger and only if the actual distress is “severe.” Otherwise, you can’t sue someone for hurt feelings alone.

I just searched “social road rage” and discovered it’s not my own coinage. Oh well.