We have a new study out!
The short version is this: "Car Brain" - the cultural blind spot that makes people apply double standards when they think about driving - is real, measurable and pervasive.
Read on for more details... 1/14 @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
For example, half were asked if they agreed:
"People shouldn't drive in highly populated areas where other people have to breathe the car fumes"
and half got:
"People shouldn't smoke in highly populated areas where other people have to breathe the cigarette fumes"
4/14
(We originally considered specific v general questions, e.g.,
"People driving cars in public places should be liable for any harm..."
"People operating machinery in public places should be liable..."
but decided that changing the context was neater and less subjective) 5/14
Here's the full set of answers. As you can see, responses could change dramatically when driving was mentioned. All except Question 2 were hugely statistically different.
This doesn't make sense! The principle is the same in both forms of each question; only context changes 6/14
Is this self-interest? Cognitive dissonance? Most people drive, so it might make sense they'd make excuses.
But no. We separated out the subset of people who didn't themselves drive and they basically responded the same as the drivers, also making special pleading for cars 8/
We end with a call for policymakers to recognise their unconscious and institutional biases and to implement mechanisms to overcome them in planning and health decisions.
You can read the full paper here for free https://psyarxiv.com/egnmj
Thanks for reading! 14/14
@ianwalker Great overview in @peterwalker99 article too...
@tgent_fens Thanks, Tim. Yes, I'd be interested to probe those things further - but, critically, as mechanisms through which the special pleading happens. I would not want to get into the realm of "Well, yes, I guess a certain number of deaths IS okay if it means people can move around..." which is the danger of this sort of thinking.
What we're calling for here is a shift in how we ask these questions: "How can we achieve the goal of moving around IN A WAY THAT FITS OUR VALUES?"
Hi. Thanks for sharing, interesting!
Having only read the summary and looked at your thread I do wonder how you took in account people not only perceiving different risks but risks actually being on a different level or coming from a different source. Ci and Cii for example appear very different to me as the deciding agent (private choice for various reasons vs work where there's always dependency) is not always the same.
As a Dutch person who lived in the UK (Wales) I suspect most people are aware of their own anti-cycling/walking bias but not their own pro-car bias.
I wonder how this is in the Netherlands though: my theory is that a much lower percentage has a anti-cycling/walking bias but a similar portion has the pro-car bias.*
Is either of you aware of research on this?
*leading to things where at stations there's free car parking and (good) paid bike parking and no-one bats an eye
@hembrow @ianwalker Solid point on the shopping streets trend. And more and more not even walking with a bicycle is permitted as it's seen as a dirty vehicle that needs to be parked on centralized dedicated infrastructure outside of the shopping zone.
Anecdotal: As I travel a lot with a small foldable bicycle (with a bag around it if it's actually dirty) the Netherlands has been the only country where I got shit for having it with me in shops.
@Pepijn @hembrow @ianwalker To be honest, parking (either car or bike) policies are very much depending on the station you are at. Most stations have at least some free bike parking of reasonable quality, some have also paid (guarded) bike parking. Many have paid car parking and some have also free car parking.
This applies to The Netherlands.
@jnbhlr If only I had enough answers to write the book on this!
Actually, we do know a lot of things that would work, but a key barrier to enacting them is cultural resistance to change. That was a big motivator for this study: we wanted to challenge the cultural biases that make it so hard to enact the fixes that we know would help (make driving harder and slower, basically...)
A book would good. A bike would be better.
My (unscientific) observation of many years is that the simple act of cycling in cities is the only consistently effective treatment for motonormativity (fun phrase). Within weeks, new cyclists start talking about motorist behavior.
It would have been interesting to track “daily urban cyclists” as a subgroup of your participants. My thesis would be daily cyclists would rank lowest on a motonormativity scale.
@ianwalker Great work! Thanks for sharing it. It'll help a lot of researchers in the field.
A question: Could some results be partially affected by linguistic confusion?
for example: the question about leaving belongings unattended in the street, most people would think of the word "belongings" as a small thing you could have in proximity at all times, very dissimilar to a car.
@ianwalker I don’t think there’s any doubt that you’re right about us making unconscious excuses for cars.  But I wonder if it is a lot more deep-seated than we realise.
It could be environmental of course, but I suspect it goes back thousands of generations.  A huge amount of information perceived by the eye does not get as far as our brain because it is filtered out, otherwise we would go mad with Information overload. I think our brain separates images by relevance.
@ianwalker food is the most important determinant.
Is it going to eat us or can we eat it?
 The body language of a man, and gives a good indication whether you’re about to become dinner; the wider the stance the higher the probability you are in his sights. 
So somewhere deep in our subconscious, our brain sees what appears to be a large mammal with its headlights looking straight at us, and our instinct is to respect it and avoid it. Many car makers deliberately tap into this e.g. Jaguar
Love that you referenced 'heteronomative'. I've done a non-scientific experiment w/this very concept. It involves asking people to close their eyes and picture what the first Homo sapiens looked like...9 out of 10 times they reply; white male.
That 1 out of 10? The epiphany.
I'm hoping your research will result in the same epiphanies on a grand scale.
@ianwalker great paper snd great term. I just replied elsewhere: will use of for teaching intersection of personhood infrastructure - car culture so deeply intertwined with how we think about what it means to be a person
@[email protected] what a good word, motonormativity. I am teaching a new module this term, on #Personhood, with one week on Infrastructure, where i am very much looking forward to letting rip on how car dependency shapes our sense of self (entitlement, individualism etc). Really designed the whole module just for that!
@ianwalker Woah 🤯 this is my introduction to the concept of the “special pleading fallacy” and it is totally congruent with my life experience.
For me, in concept and in the abstract, I am far more principled than most of my peers. In social settings these double standards come up in conversation often. — I’m just as guilty as the next person in holding and living out double standards — But with that said, having a term to describe the phenomenon is so helpful.
@ianwalker Those are striking differences. Did the research also had some population/control questions like "do you have a drivers license" or own a car, are a cyclists, age, gender etc?
Glad to see that at least "bending the safety rules" is even for car drivers not seen as acceptable (Q2)
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