Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt Read Free Book Online

each other; those other drivers are not related to you (or even an immediate threat to your “kinship group”), and you are not likely to ever see those other drivers again. Have we been fooled into thinking our altruistic gesture might be returned, or are we just inherently nice? This traffic behavior is simply one part of the larger puzzle of why humans—who, unlike ants, are not all brothers and sisters working for the queen—get along (give or take your occasional war), something that scientists are still working to explain.
    The Swiss economist Ernst Fehr and his colleagues have proposed a theory of “strong reciprocity,” which they define as “a willingness to sacrifice resources for rewarding fair and punishing unfair behavior
even if this is costly and provides neither present nor future material rewards for the reciprocator.
” This is, after all, what we are doing when we go out of our way to scold someone on the road. In experimental games that involve people donating money into a communal investment pot, the best outcome for all players is achieved when everyone pools their resources. But a single player can do best if they contribute nothing, skimming off everyone else’s profits instead. (This is like the person who drives to the front of a lengthy queue waiting to exit the highway and jumps in at the last minute.) Gradually, players stop contributing to the pool. Cooperation breaks down. When players in Fehr’s game are given an option to punish people for
not
investing, however, after a couple of rounds most people give everything they have. The willingness to punish seems to ensure cooperation.
    So perhaps, as the economist Herbert Gintis suggests, certain forms of supposed “road rage” are good things. Honking at or even aggressively tailgating that person who cut you off, while not strictly in your best self-interest, is a positive for the species. “Strong reciprocators” send signals that may make would-be cheaters more likely to cooperate; in traffic, as with any evolutionary system, conforming to the rules boosts the “collective advantage” of the group, and thus helps the individual. Not doing anything raises the risk that the transgressor will harm the good-driving group. You were not thinking of the good of the species when you honked at a rude driver, you were merely angry, but your anger may have been altruistic all the same. (And, like a bird squawking to warn of an approaching predator, honking at a threatening driver does not consume much energy.) In other words: Honk if you love Darwin!
    Whatever the evolutionary or cultural reasons for cooperation, the eyes are one of its most important mechanisms, and eye contact may be the most powerful human force we lose in traffic. It is, arguably, the reason why humans, normally a quite cooperative species in comparison with our closest primate relatives, can become so noncooperative on the road. Most of the time we are moving too fast—we begin to lose the ability to maintain eye contact around 20 miles per hour—or it is not safe to look. Maybe our view is obstructed. Often other drivers are wearing sunglasses, or their car may have tinted windows. (And do you really want to make eye contact with those drivers?) Sometimes we make eye contact through the rearview mirror, but it feels weak, not quite believable at first, as it is not “face-to-face.”
    Because eye contact is so absent in traffic, it can feel uncomfortable when it does happen. Have you ever been stopped at a light and “felt” someone in a neighboring car looking at you? It probably made you uneasy. The first reason for this is that it may violate the sense of privacy we feel in traffic. The second is that there is no purpose for it and no appropriate neutral reaction, a condition that can provoke a fight-or-flight response. So what did you do at the intersection when you saw someone looking at you? If you sped up, you were not alone. In one study, researchers had