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Worst American Drivers? REALLY??
Which state has the worst drivers? A recent poll attracted my attention, so I clicked through to an AP report. Then I looked at the results. Hmmm.
In my own experience, nothing can beat Boston drivers. People honked and gave me the finger and cursed at me [quite vilely, in fact]. My sin: I stopped for STOP signs. Next worst are NYC and LA. Stressed + arrogant + resentful = hell. In case you were wondering why I don’t live in any of those places, now you know. When I moved to western WA [aka anything within 100 miles of Seattle] from North Carolina, I was in shock. Not the traffic, per se. Don’t be insulting. NC has plenty of freeways, golly-gee. It was the sheer bloody-minded rudeness. People refusing to let me merge when I was in a left-turn-into-the-freeway-only lane, of which this area is mightily afflicted thereto. Nearly running me off the road at other times. These are very poor drivers. I was used to civility, courtesy and the ability to merge. People would slow down and open up space when they knew my lane was getting ready to end [before I figured it out]. I wanna go home! But I digress.
The point, and I do have one, is that the state ranking in the survey bore no resemblance to reality as I knew it. The southern states, where people drive nice, were at the bottom of the list, except for North Carolina, Virginia and Florida. Washington was near the middle. New York, Massachusetts and California were near the top.
I don’t think so.
So I went to the research design description. A lovely book called How to Lie With Statistics [run out and buy it NOW] explains how you can “prove” nearly any lame thing you want by manipulating how you collect your data. Use a biased sample. Use an average instead of a median. And so on, and so on. The tricks are endless.
In this case, what the researchers did is give people in all the states a test. A written test! So states where the education level is high – NY, CA, WA, MA – score high because people are test-savvy and know the right answers. That’s also why NC, VA and FL were the highest-scoring southern states. People are more educated. If you’ve ever driven in FL, full of part-time and FT, transplanted New Yorkers are on the road, you know that the craziness stays with them. They do not drive like southerners.
Now, gentle reader, does your ability to answer correctly on a DMV or other written test correlate 100% with observed behavior? Do you answer like a power-crazed maniac because that’s how you drive? Nooooooooo, you don’t.
So a survey based on written test results actually tells you which state has drivers that know how to look good on written tests. It does not tell you which states you are most likely to die in.
If the results had not led me to look up the design, I would never have figured it out. I don’t, as a rule, check the results when the results fit my experience, that is, when I think they are true. I only check when I think they are wrong. NO one is immune to perceptual bias, no matter how logical and rational they think they are. Reality does not exist, there is only what I perceive through my filters. But what I intellectually know – and I can ace a test on it – and what I am aware of 24/7, especially when my filters are engaged, can be very different beasts.
I wonder what other egregious nonsense gets past me because it supports my pre-conceived notions and prejudices? So for the next few days, until I get really slammed with work or forget to Reiki myself for the full 30 minutes in the AM, I will be more mindful than usual. We can’t remove our humanity and its perceptual filters, all we can do is reduce the mindless application of them. For the next several days, at least, I will try.