Bumper stickers reveal link to road rage — something I’d long suspected:
Bumper stickers such as “Make Love, Not War” and “More Trees, Less Bush” speak volumes about a vehicle’s driver — but maybe not in the way they might hope. People who customize their cars with stickers and other adornments are more prone to road rage than other people, according to researchers in Colorado.
[...]
The researchers recorded whether people had added seat covers, bumper stickers, special paint jobs, stereos and even plastic dashboard toys. They also asked questions about how the participants responded to specific driving situations.To keep the participants from realizing that the team was collecting information about aggressive driving, questions such as “If someone is driving slow in the fast lane, how angry does this make you?” were interspersed with decoy questions such as “What kind of music do you listen to in the car?”. Szlemko’s team used a pre-existing scale called “Use of vehicle to express anger” to diagnose the presence of road rage in their participants.
People who had a larger number of personalized items on or in their car were 16% more likely to engage in road rage, the researchers report in the journal Applied Social Psychology.
“The number of territory markers predicted road rage better than vehicle value, condition or any of the things that we normally associate with aggressive driving,” say Szlemko. What’s more, only the number of bumper stickers, and not their content, predicted road rage — so “Jesus saves” may be just as worrying to fellow drivers as “Don’t mess with Texas”.