We have all been there on that hot day headed to the beach, or the rainy day en route to our in-laws, or just about anywhere, and you can do nothing but creep along the freeway inch by stressful inch as you slowly come to terms with the reality that there is no way you can be on time.
Traffic never travels a fluid fifteen miles per hour either, rather it composes itself of an endless series of inconsistent starts and stops whose purpose can only be to make sure that you’re not becoming numb to its charms by zoning out. Traffic delays are terrible. Worse though is the habitual and voluntary traffic ridden commute that characterizes so many of our lives. In light of the countless mornings and evenings on the same route commuters can likely predict with uncanny accuracy when they will arrive at their destination, give or take a red light here or there. So why is this particular drive still so stressful? Certainly it has something to do with the opportunity cost of sitting purposelessly on the road rather than sleeping in or spending time with the family (a feeling of loss), but I think some insights from behavioral economics will go a long way toward calming traffic nerves and helping to create a smoother commute by pointing to the way our brain deals with the dynamics of traffic.
First, would you rather get $900
outright, or have a 90% chance to gain $1000?
Next, would you rather lose $900
outright, or have a 90% chance to lose $1000?
If you’re like most people you probably took the sure-thing
$900 in the first question and chose to take a chance in the second. Another
one: would you accept a bet where in heads you receive $150 but in tails you
lose $100? At what point would you take that bet? Maybe if you could gain $200
and lose $100 at a 2:1 ratio?
As humans we are risk averse, meaning we pay more attention
to negatives and losses than we do to positive outcomes and gains. It hurts
more to lose than it feels good to gain. Also, we tend to peg our frame of reference from
which we judge loss and gains to some sort of baseline. If our former job paid
us more than our current job we will feel a sense of loss since we have pegged
our earning expectations on that past figure. These ideas form part of the
basis for Prospect Theory…so how does it apply to traffic?
When we first get on the freeway we generally select the
best lane at that time. Although this bit of progress is merely a snapshot of
the overall undulation of traffic it serves for us as a baseline, an instance
where we were moving faster than the other cars around us. There is an optimal
fast lane when the freeway is moving at average speed, so one of these few
lanes must necessarily be moving faster than the others, right? Just as the
lane we chose begins to come to a stop the lane next to us that we had just
come from, including that red Dodge Caravan we were behind, goes steadily past
us. Ouch, I should have stayed there. This back and forth is one of the
enduring stresses exacted upon the commuter every day, but with Prospect Theory
it makes sense.
With our baseline, or even without it, we expect to be
moving faster than the majority of the rest of traffic; we chose the fastest
lane didn’t we? Passing other cars is good but normal, impossibly stressful
though is when we get past. Gain versus loss. The loss we feel from being left
behind far outweighs what we felt when we were doing the passing, if we even
realized we were ‘winning’ at all. Our aversion to loss often forces us into
the other lane in search of gaining ground, only to have the lane we just came
from whiz past us as the traffic accordion expands and contracts. Stress! It
doesn't help our cause that when we get passed we can see all the cars go by
and keep an eye on them until they have gone out of view, whereas when we are
in the lead every car we pass falls out of sight and mind almost immediately.
How often after you pass a car in traffic do you stare at them in your
rear-view mirror?
Internalizing Prospect Theory and applying it to the daily
commute leads to this prescription: disregard the ebb and flow of traffic
because you will disproportionately pay attention to the feeling of loss when
cars go by than you will to the gain of being in the correct lane at the
correct time. And this doesn't just go for the daily commute, there are
limitless applications that can help you be patient and relaxed! People say
that they have bad luck and always pick the slow lane when checking out at the grocery store, and if it’s not you
saying that you at least know someone who does. But think of the sheer amount
of times that you have checked out without incident. Those don’t stick out
nearly as much as the times we felt loss. And it is absurd to believe that of
the eight check-out stands we can see ours should be the fastest, always, yet
the strong aversion to loss helps us to feel this way. Ultimately if we realize
our brains are tuned more into the channel of loss aversion we can recalibrate
it and move toward a mindset that celebrates the gains and doesn't disparage disproportionately
at the losses. And anyway there are other things you could be thinking about, like water.
Deeper: Prospect Theory comes from Nobel Laureate Daniel
Kahneman. His book Thinking Fast And Slow is one of the most important you will ever come across. After I had thought about this application to traffic I heard it
explained in the audiobook version of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do by Tom Vanderbilt during my morning commute. I imagine it came to him
too while sitting in traffic…
