Safe Speed Forums

Why does almost everyone think they know "all they need to know" about driving?

It applies to politicians, councillors, road safety officers (!), the motoring and the non-motoring public.

Most drivers rate themselves as above average. It's the same effect.

In the vast majority of cases they have taken no training since their driving test - or maybe they don't even drive - yet they feel fully qualified to make judgements about safe driving.

Why? There MUST be a good reason! What causes this "human error"?

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

With politicians and councillors - it's called "Nanny knows best" and "back seat driving in stretch limo" syndrome!

With the rest of the motoring numpty "never read the HC brigade!" it is called complacency! A disease which only the British seem to suffer from!

(Mad Moggie will run for cover - admitting deeply influenced by "she who wears the trousers!")

'a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing' possibly.

I must confess that I would have said I was an above average driver before having any advanced lessons, however since having some advanced motorcycle lessons, what an eye opener. My observation skils were greatly improved, as well as improving my ability to 'make progress'.

Would anyone admit to being a poor driver? What constitutes and average driver?

I can identify with you mate!

Took my L-test back in '76, and then did Advanced Test about 4 years later, and followed that with RoSPA test. Book assessment drives every so often to ensure no bad habits develop too!

The Advanced Test really brings home to you how basic the original L Test is - and still is - despite the introduction of hazard perception and driving theory. As said in thread eleswhere - it does nowhere near match the German equivalent which my wife and family all took! (They are all car mad - and with so many advanced bods in one family - er you tend to get assessed all the time )

(The whole bunch of them are German trained advanced rally driving geeks!)

Can only say that my experience as Advanced Driver makes me evaluate every drive.

Do not know what makes a vast majority have personality change from nice bloke to aggressive numpty behind the wheel - especially when said majority do not undertake any kind of further training once past the L-Test? Complacency perhaps? Ideas that they as good as the stuntmen in Hollywood? Confusing stunts with reality even?

Until we get a periodic "brush-up your skills" - costs of which could quite easily be offset by lowered insurance premiums as the "carrot" - we will never change bad and complacent attitudes

Hi all,

I think there's a special effect - something deep in the human condition - that leads many to underestimate their lack of knowledge of the subject.

A former advanced instructor of mine suggested that driving triggers deep psychological traits associated with the hunting instinct.

Think about some of the feelings and experiences associated with driving... fear, danger, risk, thrill, satisfaction, confidence, power, challenge, concentration.

And think about how many aspects of the actual process of driving fall somewhere below the fully conscious level. We have a whole series of subconscious behaviours that affect the quality of our driving. Many things frequently happen without any apparent conscious decision. For example:

* deciding where to look (at least in situations lacking obvious and immediate danger)
* operating the controls (we reach a level where we decide where we want to go, and steer without actually planning to turn the steering wheel)
* some drivers go for miles "on autopilot"; steering a course, adjusting speed, changing gear and avoiding hazards without once thinking about what they are doing.

Then there's the whole association with prowess. There's a social stigma about being a bad driver, and especially about telling someone that they are a bad driver. Why is that?

So we have a unique conbination of factors: skill, risk, performance, subconscious control, power, prowess and so on. Perhaps these factors tend not to be present together in our ordinary lives. Exceptions might include sports - but in sports we're usually measuring our performance directly against others - it's obvious if we're crap at it!

So maybe this blend of factors works with ancient instincts to lead us to make unjustified judgements about our skills and knowledge.

When we get advanced driver instruction, we apply more conscious control to the process and the "unjustified judgements" tend to diminish. Advanced drivers usually become critical of their own performance, and the whole "there's nothing left to learn" thing also tends to diminish.

Sorry if that's a bit of a ramble - perhaps someone can spot something in there and make more sense of the whole thing.

I've wondered for years: "What is it about driving that makes the average chap think he knows enough?" There must be a simple answer in there somewhere.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I read an excellent book called "The Winning Mind" by ex racing driver, psychologist John Whitmore (he now writes an excellent monthly column for the Telegraph motoring section by the way). This book is about improving your performance at sailing, but much of it would apply to any "high skill" activity.

Anyway (there is a point, trust me!), he makes the assertion that our best performance is actually when we trust our subconscious mind to get on with the job in hand, as it acts faster than our conscious mind and doesn't apply emotion to decision making etc.

He even asserts that those times when we drive totally on auto-pilot (even to the extent of having no recollection of part or all of a journey) are actually the times when we drive at our best! So his belief is that "conscious" training should be simply to put the right reactions in place for our sub-conscious mind to later act upon, and if we want to do something at our best we should then allow our "natural" mind to get on with it and even deliberately occupy our conscious mind with an alternate task, such as deciding what we will make for tea tonight.

Not sure quite how this fits in with the topic, if at all, but it's an interesting spin on the "driver training" issue...

Discuss!

Paul Safespeed made point about social stigma and immediate defensive reaction to criticism that one is a "bad driver". Often wondered about this myself.

Perhaps it is the subconscious reminding us that we are fallible and that we are in charge of something which could kill under unforeseen circumstances, and it is maybe a basic subconscious unwillingness to acknowledge that a bad mistake can cause total carnage! How many murderers go into "denial" when faced with consequences of their crime. The jails are full of "innocent" people! Perhaps this is why we do not like getting copped for any "transgression"


As for autopilot - again when you become skilled or used to something - it becomes automatic behaviour. I can diagnose a patient from experience, my wife (some will know her on Pistonheads! as WildCat) can flit from one foreign language to another without thinking! We will probably do most of our jobs at work "on autocruise!" With driving - a great many will perform certain tasks such as gear change without thinking! Tootle around at lower speeds - even drift just over a posted, without conscious awareness. But they will avoid accidents because subconscious notes the danger and becomes conscious at that point! I think that is what John Whitmore is saying!???


But at high speeds - I think one concentrates more because of the danger, because of the need to react very quickly and because that subconscious wakes up as permanent and warns us that a mistake can cost!

I don't really like the sound of that. My driving is definately at it's best when I'm in a relaxed state of high concentration. Everything except the road (and its contents etc) disappears and maximum safe progress can be achieved. Contrary to what it seems to say in the books, I can maintain this state for hours on end without fatigue and I find it immensely satisfying.

I agree that the subconscious part is very important - that's how the car and its controls tend to disappear - but best performance surely requires conscious concentration acting as "director"?

I'm quite worried about "switched off" drivers on autopilot. In my experience, I have tended to equate such behavious with inattention to the task at hand.

What do others think?

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I think I may have explained it badly. This state of "relaxed concentration" is I think what Whitmore aims for. His idea is that you can train your subconscious mind to improve its level of awareness, but then you should trust it to get on with the job in hand, while your active mind deals with the higher level "strategic" decisions.

This is all from memory, but as I recall it, the two principle advantages of this approach are firstly that our reactions are actually faster when conscious thought doesn't intervene, and secondly the subconscious mind isn't hampered as much by stress or fatigue, so uses less energy.

I read somewhere else that we can actually react faster to an input (eg child running in front of car) when we are not consciously waiting for it, and this seems to tie in.

From your description of driving in a state of relaxed, heightened awareness, it sounds like you are actually operating on the principles that Whitmore describes, though maybe not exactly in the way that I (badly) described it.

I suppose the point I was making, relative to the topic, was this notion that you actually do drive safely at the times when you do so subconsciously. When you forget parts of a journey it is simply because no sudden event took place to require your conscious mind to kick in and deal with it, but had it done so it would have been dealt with.

I must go and dig the book out again. It made a lot of sense at the time I read it, and it definitely improved my performance as a sailor...

There is a management training theory that could be applied to this, I forget its source, but it describes four learning steps as follows:

Unconscious incompetence
Conscious incompetence
Conscious competence
Subconscious competence

I think this is a very useful model for many learning processes including driving, but it is important to break down the objective (driving well) into meaningful categories, such as car control (autopilot may be best), hazard awareness (conscious competence may be best for concentration), the law etc.

BTW I expect that the purpose of IAM's insistence on push-pull steering and brake-gear overlap is to force good drivers into the conscious competence step as far as car control is concerned. Essentially it is attitude training.

PS forums excellent development of the SafeSpeed site. Yet more good work!!

Regards
Jim Brooks

Yes. My thoughts exactly. I might be able to extend it slightly - I believe that a number of Roadcraft techniques are indeed "attitude training proxies". They force one to plan ahead more and train one not to rush.

I mentioned the effect on the following Safe Speed page:

http://www.safespeed.org.uk/roadsafety.html

I've never heard it spoken, nor seen it in writing anywhere else.



Thanks, Jim. It's good to be appreciated.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Paul,

You may recall that I alluded to this point in a EMail I sent you a few weeks ago, before this forum was established it must have been.

I believe it is something to do with a mental state known as Cognitive Dissonance, I read an article in a motoring mag a few years ago that touched on the subject and I later revisited it as part of my university studies into attitude.

Cognitive Dissonance occurs when a person encounters a situation about which he/she knows certain things to be factually correct, but makes a mental discconect between those facts and their own actions relating towards them. The usual example quoted is Aesop's tale of the fox who happens upon a bunch of sweet looking grapes hanging just out of his reach. Because he canot reach them the fox reassures himself with the thought that they would not have been worth eating anyway, they were probably sour...hence the expression Sour Grapes.

In a motoring sense, we the great unwashed, make certain descisions about other drivers actions versus our own.
For example, you are driving slowly through an unfamiliar town looking for a street or building, behind you someone is impatient to get past. You dismiss them as being unreasonably impatient and continue on your way. Reverse the situation and you believe the person driving slowly in frnot of you is just being awkward and should get out of your way. Similalrly those who look to park their cars as close to the supermarket entrance as possible are just being lazy, when you do it it's because it makes practical sense to cart those heavy bags the shortest distance. Etc etc.

Furthermore, we only really notice people doing things wrong, tailgating, using their mobile, speeding etc. Thus we build up this impression that we aren't a studid as those other idiots, numpties etc, therefore we must be a better driver than they are, and as there are so many of them, we must be better than average! A conveninet self-assessment based on subjective bias.

When somebody has the temerity to criticise our driving (e.g do you HAVE to drive so close to that car), this criticism clashes with our own convenient self built image of our driving skills, and we encounter a state of CD.

Finally when we hear/see a radio or TV commercial relating to driving, Cognitive Dissonance results in what the media glibly dissmiss as the "it doesn't apply to me" syndrome. The result is the same, we dismiss the advice as relating to other peoples weaknesses.

Jeff Davis

Have you never done the autopilot thing Paul (maybe you just havent realised )?
Most people I have spoken to about the subject have at some point or other driven somewhere and then not realised what happened to the last 5 miles! A scary thought indeed, but none of them have had an accident while doing it. I cant say I have noticed doing it myself for a while, but I have certainly done it in the past and felt very guilty when realising.

Autopilot is bad... but wait till you lose your car in a large car park through it That used to happen to me quite often when I worked for a large company and had to start at the crack of dawn.

I have noticed that it usually happens on mundane and steady journeys. I can honestly say it has never happened when I have been out on country roads enjoying myself. Maybe there is a connection???

Or wonder why the hell you can't get in the car before working out it's not yours. That happened to me once in a multi-storey full of similar looking rep-mobiles to the one I was rolling around in at the time. I got out on the wrong floor and an identical grey Vauxhall had parked in the same place I'd left mine on the floor above.

As for having little or no memory of a journey, that has happened to me once but I'm not sure if it's something to worry about a great deal. If I'd had even one near miss as the result of inattention to the road I'm sure I'd remember it. Most likely I parked up, put the kettle on, switched on the TV and within minutes completely forgot about the drive home as nothing of any importance happened. Sadly if you drive any distance in the London area now it's unlikely that you won't be either cut up, trapped behind a slow driver, tailgated by an impatient driver, stuck in a traffic jam, have someone pull out without looking and/or signalling or have a pedestrian or cyclist appear in front of your car (and then look at you like it's somehow your fault that they didn't check the road first). Invariably something happens that makes the journey stick in your mind for a while.

I'm not sure why everyone thinks they're a good driver. Certainly I've never heard anyone proudly state that their driving is lousy. For sure there's a stigma attached to being a poor driver, so none of us want to think of ourselves as belonging to that group. Perhaps for a few there's an element of wishful thinking as well, a delusion that we might be as good behind the wheel as the best drivers of motorsport. I know that I'm as likely to be as good a driver as the McCraes or Schumachers of this world as I am to beat Tiger Woods over 18 holes or kick like Jonny Wilkinson. But I've met a few people that I'm not convinced recognise this in themselves. The thought of letting one of 'em loose in, say, one of those road going versions of a Subaru WRC isn't a comfortable one.

The biggest problem I have is that I don't know what exactly an average driver is, and without a definition of an average driver I can't honestly say that I am above average. I'd like to be, and as I try to drive considerately and to improve my standards I hope I am above average. Knowing is another matter. Next time someone tells you that they're an above average driver, just ask them to explain to you what an average driver is. If they don't know what average is then they can't possibly measure themselves against it, and I'd expect that to apply to most drivers.

Hi all,

i've often arrived home and can't remember a jot about the journey or what i done at certain junctions/roundabouts etc. and i thought it can't be something that your mind wants to remember as the same route can become very tedious therefore it becomes mapped in your mind, maybe that's why drivers who drive all over the country seem more skilled drivers as their scenery is always changing though some reps leave a lot to be desired.

On the subject of what i think of my driving skills, i think i have a natural rapport with driving and many people have said i'm quite good although i have some right silly habits and am the typical " ill never crash type of guy " maybe i'll go out and crash just to get it over with !

Andrew

Funny story.

I parked my car in a local multi-story and as usual checked what floor I was on as I left the car. Big round sign on each end wall said 5.

Came back, went to floor 5, no sign of the car. Tried 6 and 4, still no sign.

Only then did I realise all floors had the same signs at each end, a number 5 on white background with a red border.

DOH!

Luckily it's a fairly small carpark.

Back to topic, I thought I knew everything about driving until I started visiting forums like this and discussing things. Now I'm not so quick to comment without trying to do a bit of research first.