Or as I like to refer to it, the “I’m always right” theory. It is a tenet of social psychology that says essentially that we all attribute our shortcomings to mitigating circumstances while attributing the shortcomings of others to basic flaws in their personality. It works like this:
A pedestrian steps into a crosswalk just before the Walk sign flashes. A cyclist at the intersection is trying to make a right turn past the pedestrian and into a bike lane without stopping, just as the light for perpendicular traffic is turning red. A car approaching from the left of the cyclist is speeding to beat the light. The cyclist cuts the pedestrian off and turns sharply to avoid the car, whose driver hits the brakes and the horn at the same time, and is in turn flipped off by both the cyclist and the pedestrian, who also simultaneously flip each other off. (Which means, if nothing else, that the cyclist wins the prize for ‘Most Acrobatic.’ It’s really hard to flip the bird accurately in opposite directions at two different people and keep a bike upright.)
Everyone in this situation gets to yell indignantly at everyone else, sure that their own actions were defensible while those other parties were incomprehensibly outrageous. Each one indulges in the belief that they – had they been that driver, cyclist, pedestrian – would never do what the other two did!
Which of course is a load of hooey. We all skirt (or out-and-out break) the traffic rules all the time. But in our inventive minds, when we do it we have perfectly good reasons. But since we can’t or won’t imagine the reasons the others acted the way they did, that can only mean the others are jerks. As someone completely uneducated in anthropological ways, I imagine this attitude comes from having to eat someone else’s dinner in order to live; it’s a survival instinct to choose our life over that of a stranger, we believe we are inherently more worth saving. We deserve it more, and we put in the mental hours to explain it to ourselves.
Stopping there, vilifying others in traffic who are actually a lot like ourselves would be bad enough. However, all of us share those stories of traffic encounters with jerks-who-are-actually-like-us. We tell our friends and family, our fellow cyclists/pedestrians/drivers, our barbers, bartenders, grocery clerks, produce guys, bus seat companions, whoever will listen. We build confirmatory stories in which we star as the valiant hero(ine) striving sanely while the world goes crazy around us. We do this even when we know better.
And the stories we tell are self-reinforcing. The next time we get into a traffic encounter we’re even more ready to pre-judge, convict and execute all transgressors, even readier tell tales of our encounters, reinforce our self-referential world. It gets to be a game, where foxhole companions one-up each other with stories of more and more egregious encounters, until it seems really like we should have the right shoot one or two of the worst transgressors as a lesson to the rest of them. The roots grow deep and the stories become impossible to untangle from who we really are and what really happened. They become a part of the folklore of our given form of transportation.
And thus, traffic battle lines are drawn.
So here’s what we do. The next time one of us has a negative encounter in traffic, stop and assume full responsibility and apologize, no matter how right you think you were. Wave to that driver or pedestrian and tap your chest: ‘my fault!’ Every time you want to tell a story of some horrible traffic encounter where you were the innocent victim, you have to follow it with another story in which you were the culprit. When you hear another's tale of woe, start asking questions. Ask them how they know what the driver’s/pedestrian’s/cyclist’s intention was? Speculate on why a person might have done what that transgressor did. Make the story teller think. In the long run (or even the short run), the 'other' is as wrong as we say, and we're not as right as we think.
In addition to that dog-eat-dog survivalist mentality, my lousy anthropology also tells me that humans have thrived as well as we have through cooperation, which includes not behaving as if we’re above doing wrong ourselves. Which includes cutting each other some slack.
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