Who Are Most Likely Not To Stop For People in Crosswalks?
Who Are Most Likely Not To Stop For People in Crosswalks?
Men in expensive cars, that’s who.
It turns out that the hunch I’ve had for years is true: men driving expensive cars are most likely to not stop for people in crosswalks:
The science is looking pretty unanimous on this one: Drivers of expensive cars are the worst.
A new study has found that drivers of flashy vehicles are less likely to stop and allow pedestrians to cross the road – with the likelihood they’ll slow down decreasing by 3% for every extra $1,000 that their vehicle is worth.
Researchers from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas speculated that the expensive car owners “felt a sense of superiority over other road users” and were less able to empathize with lowly sidewalk-dwellers.They came to this conclusion after asking volunteers to cross a sidewalk hundreds of times, filming and analyzing the responses by car drivers.
Researchers used one white and one black man, and one white and one black woman – also finding that cars were more likely to yield for the white and female participants. Vehicles stopped 31% of the time for both women and white participants, compared with 24% of the time for men and 25% of the time for black volunteers.
But the best predictor of whether a car would stop was its cost, researchers discovered. “Disengagement and a lower ability to interpret thoughts and feelings of others along with feelings of entitlement and narcissism may lead to a lack of empathy for pedestrians” among costly car owners, they theorized in the study. And the discovery of a car-value-to-jerkish-behavior correlation isn’t new; the research, published in the Journal of Transport and Health, backed up a Finnish study published last month that found that men who own flashy vehicles are more likely to be “argumentative, stubborn, disagreeable and unempathetic.
"According to that survey of 1,892 drivers by the University of Helsinki, those deemed to have more disagreeable character traits were "more drawn to high-status cars.”
I guess their ‘logic’ is that since they paid so much for their cars then they have a greater right to the right of way. Which is, of course, patently false.