Psychopaths And Driving

More assumptions without evidence...

I know, I know, I owe you guys a story, but for right now you are getting an adorable cat and an article about a “common driving habit that indicates that someone might be a psychopath”.

Apparently, The Daily Mail is currently preoccupied with psychopathy, and the events of the story that I am to write are still unfolding, so it would be a story without an end if I wrote it up now. I decided that I needed to write about something else while I get all that squared away, so here we are with an article that will one hundred percent be nonsense.

Shall we?

Revealed: The common driving habit that indicates someone might be a psychopath

People with psychopathic traits are more likely to use their phones while driving

They're also more likely than average to have committed a driving offence 

Ah, off to a BS start, are we Daily Mail? I know a cohort of two psychopaths, and neither of us use our phones while driving. We also both dislike people that do. Neither I nor the other psychopath that I know, are obsessed with our phones. Rarely is mine anywhere near me in general, nor do I have it anywhere in the vicinity of the driver’s seat. However, let’s have fun with their arguments…

If you commute during rush hour traffic, then it may sometimes seem like the roads are completely full of psychopaths.

Tell me you know nothing about psychopathy without telling me you know nothing about psychopathy…

But scientists have now determined that there is one common driving habit which may be a sign somebody is actually a psychopath.

Researchers from the University of Regensburg found a significant correlation between psychopathic traits and using your mobile phone while behind the wheel. 

How though?

No, seriously, how did you arrive at this conclusion? Do tell, I would really like to know.

Drivers who tested highly for dark personality traits - Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy - were much more likely to use their phones and to feel less guilty about it. 

All right… you are dealing with the so-called “dark triad” which is nonsense, so that tells me a great deal about this “study”, which I cannot find the link to by the way. Maybe I will find it further down, but so far, nothing.

The study also found that drivers with high levels of psychopathy were a third more likely than average to have committed a traffic offence in the last 12 months. 

Hmm, my cohort of two also disagrees with this. Neither of us have traffic violations in the last ten years.

In the study, the researchers collected data from 989 German drivers who underwent surveys to test for each of the three dark triad personality traits, ranked on a scale of one to five.

Good lord, I found the study, and this is all you need to know about it:

Participants were recruited mainly through mailing lists and social networks, such as Facebook. Apart from being over 18 years of age, requirements for participating in the study were smartphone ownership and regular driving.

No. You cannot come to any conclusions with this nonsensical data collection method. First of all, the age. They have to be eighteen? Nope. They have to be twenty-five. All I hear in recent years when reading about human behavior, especially when it comes to teenagers, is about brain development and how the age that it is finished keeps getting the goal posts moved in terms of age. Now, apparently, it’s twenty-seven. However, despite that, and despite how the brain matures, and despite psychopathy not being able to be identified in someone with an immature brain, we keep including teenagers in these studies.

If we go by the standard, twenty-five, they have seven more years of maturation before they can even be considered psychopathic, but I think this also should call into question the notion of Machiavellianism and narcissism, as well. These are people that have brain that are drastically underdeveloped in the personality arena, and that’s just to start with.

Next. You sent out a survey to a bunch of people that have no way of being properly identified as psychopathic, Machiavellian, or narcissistic. That’s not data, that’s speculation. People often lie on those surveys. They do so due to many factors, but one of them is simply that humans may think about themselves in one way, and that is the lens that they will answer those questions through, when in reality they are very different. It often takes an outside observer who will ask the proper questions in the proper ways to suss out how a person truly thinks. Often their perception does not reflect reality.

Surveys can be useful for collecting some data, but they certainly cannot take the place of actual diagnoses by actual professionals. You cannot draw conclusions like this based on them. You need actual psychopaths to arrive at any conclusion regarding us.

Their survey revealed that 61 percent of the participants admitted to using their smartphone while driving at least occasionally. 

Call me a sexist, but:

The study sample consisted of 989 participants, with 724 (73%) women, 263 (26%) men, and two participants with other sexual identities.

I think it is far more reasonable to conclude that it is women that have an issue with using their smartphones while driving. That also tends to correlate with what I have observed in the world. There are a lot of young women that are totally addicted to their phone. Granted, I have seen this in men as well, but far less frequently.

However, the researchers discovered that higher scores for any of the three dark triad traits were linked with increased phone use while driving. 

Nope, and y’all are stupid. Let me break this down very clearly.

1. Smartphones are addictive. This has been proven again and again, and the age of the people that they solicited responses from, they have been literally raised with smartphones, so their brains are wired for them.

2. Social media is also addictive, and more so than smartphones themselves. Many young people cannot go five minutes without interacting with some part of their social media accounts.

3. Psychopaths cannot get addicted to anything, and that includes smartphones and social media. We do not care about what other people think of us, and don’t take selfies. This is not behavior that a psychopath is going to care about at all, unless it is absolutely necessary to achieve a specific goal. However, it is never going to be because we want to know how many people commented on some Instagram post.

4. People that are on their phones all the time are getting some sort of emotional fix from them. That doesn’t happen for psychopaths. There is no emotional fix.

5. Social media creates its own form of narcissism, and I think that there will be room in the future for this form of narcissism to be studied, but a great deal of the social media narcissism that I have observed seems to stem from deep insecurity. This will never happen for a psychopath. The type of narcissism that social media seems to create should be studied, but it is not the “narcissism” that the so-called dark triad speaks about.

6. Machiavellianism isn’t a diagnosis, it is a lifestyle strategy. There is nothing about it that is going to necessitate a person being on their phone all the time. Machiavellianism can be adopted by almost anyone, save for psychopaths, as what Machiavellianism attempts to achieve is living similarly to a psychopath and managing the natural emotions that a psychopath lacks. If some who is Machiavellian is also addicted to a smartphone, that wouldn’t surprise me, as there is bound to be overlap. Most humans are susceptible to addiction. That isn’t remotely shocking.

The researchers, in their paper published in PLOS One, write: 'Thus, people with Dark Triad personalities tend to use their phones more often while driving.'

Their paper’s conclusions are silly and totally disregard all the things that they are supposedly researching. They did no work with actual psychopathy, narcissism, or Machiavellianism. Their conclusions are based on nonsense. Do you know who is going to be using their smartphone while driving?

1. People who are addicted

2. Immature people

3. Entitled people

4. People with underdeveloped brains who cannot predict the consequences of their behavior

5. People that have a short span of attention

6. People that do not truly understand the risk involved with doing so

7. People that overestimate their abilities to do many things at a time

Drivers with higher scores for narcissism and psychopathy were also less likely to feel guilty about their problematic driving behaviour. 

Well, when it comes to psychopathy, of course we don’t feel guilty about driving habits, be them good or bad, because we literally cannot feel guilt. This is like saying that a colorblind person won’t be able to see color. Right, that’s what colorblind means. Psychopathy means, no guilt about anything.

However, that does not mean that the people not feeling guilty for being an assh*le driver is either psychopathic or narcissistic. They might just be… wait for it…

An asshole.

Amazing, right? They exist, and they’re everywhere. Entitled people aren’t necessarily narcissistic, but that doesn’t change the fact that they behave like an entitled pain in the ass.

Those who scored highly for Machiavellianism, a personality trait often linked to manipulative behaviour, were more likely to try and hide their phone usage.  

And just what makes a person score highly for Machiavellianism? Let’s see what they say:

• Manipulative and self-interested.

• Ruthless and exploitative behaviour with a lack of morality

So… humans then? Because this covers a whole lot of humans and most of them do not qualify for any sort of diagnosis, or even being labeled with Machiavellianism. I don’t think that most person that has been overtaken with road rage qualifies for any other label other than, “person with road rage at that moment”.

Now, granted, there are some people that live in the road rage mentality, and perhaps they do qualify for being suspected of having some sort of issue going on psychologically, but that is not the vast majority of them. \

Now let’s move on to driving offenses.

The researchers also found that psychopathic traits were a good predictor of whether someone would have committed a traffic offence. 

For someone with the minimum psychopathy score of one, the researchers predict there is a 9.89 per cent probability of them having committed a driving offence in the last 12 months. 

What is a psychopathy score of one? Because that sounds, to me, like the lowest possible score of “psychopathy” there could be on a scale. It sort of seems like that would be a large portion of the population. Psychopathy exists on a spectrum that everyone falls on somewhere, from not at all psychopathic, to an ‘A’-Lister. If you do this on a scale of one to ten, then a one would be the lowest possible number you could be. Once again, I have no traffic offenses. I do drive fast when the opportunity presents itself, but that’s the extent of it. I don’t run up on people, cut people off, or anything of that sort.

They speak about some of the questions that they asked, you can see some of them here:

They seem like very basic questions that would apply to a huge number of people. What’s interesting to me, however, is that they are trying to demonstrate psychopathy based on these questions, and not a single one apply to me, an actual psychopath. It would be nice if the people doing these studies would stop doing them to appear intelligent, and instead, actually do a reasonable study of psychopathy.

They make some spurious claims about the number of traffic offenses that a person with “average levels of psychopathy” would commit, which is a bizarre thing to claim. What on earth is, “average levels of psychopathy”. That makes no sense, and no, it is not explained in the study that I could find.

The conclusion of the article is the kicker though:

Participants were also tested for problematic smartphone use (PSU), which is an excessive use of phones to the point at which other areas of life are negatively impacted.

The researchers note that this phenomenon may be surprisingly common, with 50 per cent of respondents to one survey saying they could not live without a smartphone. 

The researchers found that PSU, regardless of other personality traits, was the strongest predictor of phone use while driving.

Oh, you mean addicts. I feel like I mentioned that before. If you can’t live without your smartphone, and you have to be on it all the time because you are addicted to it, then yeah, you’re probably going to use it in the car while driving.

I can live just fine without a smartphone. They’re convenient, but they certainly aren’t necessary, and mine is almost never anywhere near me. It would have been nice if the researchers could have spent their time speaking to actual psychopaths, have a working understanding of how we think and how our brain works, instead of making up a bunch of stuff.

This “study” comes across as looking for a place to lay the balme for the people that think that using their phone while driving. It seems their thinking is that this can’t be something that normal people do, so let’s blame psychopaths, narcissists, and Machiavellians.

So lazy. Do better.