The Psychology Of The Car

The Psychology of the Car explores automotive cultures through the lens of psychology with the goal of achieving a low-carbon transport future. Worldwide there are now more than one billion cars, and their number grows continuously. Yet there is growing evidence that humanity needs to reach ‘peak cars’ as increased air pollution, noise, accidents, and climate change support a decline in car usage. While many governments agree, the car remains attractive, and endeavors to change transport systems have faced fierce resistance. Based on insights from a wide range of transport behaviors, The Psychology of the Car shows the “why of automotive cultures, providing new perspectives essential for understanding its attractiveness and for defining a more desirable transport future. The Psychology of the Car illustrates the growth of global car use over time and its effect on urban transport systems and the global environment. It looks at the adoption of the car into lifestyles, the “mobilities turn, and how the car impacts collective and personal identities. The book examines car drivers themselves; their personalities, preferences, and personality disorders relevant to driving. The book looks at the role power, control, dominance, speed, and gender play, as well as the interrelationship between personal freedom and law enforcement. The book explores risk-taking behaviors as accidental death is a central element of car driving. The book addresses how interventions can be successful as well as which interventions are unlikely to work, and concludes with how a more sustainable transport future can be created based on emerging transport trends. Features deep analyses of individual and collective psychologies of car affection, moving beyond sociology-based interpretations of automobile culture Illustrates concepts using popular culture examples that expose ideas about automobility Shows how fewer, smaller and more environmentally friendly cars, as well as low-carbon transport modes, are more socially attractive

Do we become better or worse drivers as we age? Why do we indulge in risky behaviour when driving? Will technology remove the human role in driving forever? The Psychology of Driving is a fascinating introduction into the psychological factors at play when people get behind the wheel. Exploring the role of personality traits and cognitive functions such as attention in driving, the book considers why human error is most often to blame in road accidents, and how we can improve driver safety. The book debunks the myth that men are better drivers than women and considers why some people indulge in knowingly risky behaviour on the road, including using mobile phones and drink/drug-driving. In a time when driverless cars are becoming a reality, The Psychology of Driving shows us how human behaviour and decisions can still affect our lives on the road.

While the individual benefits of car-based travel continues to be recognized, the wider environmental and social cost of automobiles is also significant. This title evaluates the evidence for better understanding 'what drives us to drive'.

The inside story of the groundbreaking experiment that captured what people think about the life-and-death dilemmas posed by driverless cars. Human drivers don't find themselves facing such moral dilemmas as "should I sacrifice myself by driving off a cliff if that could save the life of a little girl on the road?" Human brains aren't fast enough to make that kind of calculation; the car is over the cliff in a nanosecond. A self-driving car, on the other hand, can compute fast enough to make such a decision--to do whatever humans have programmed it to do. But what should that be? This book investigates how people want driverless cars to decide matters of life and death. In The Car That Knew Too Much, psychologist Jean-François Bonnefon reports on a groundbreaking experiment that captured what people think cars should do in situations where not everyone can be saved. Sacrifice the passengers for pedestrians? Save children rather than adults? Kill one person so many can live? Bonnefon and his collaborators Iyad Rahwan and Azim Shariff designed the largest experiment in moral psychology ever: the Moral Machine, an interactive website that has allowed people --eventually, millions of them, from 233 countries and territories--to make choices within detailed accident scenarios. Bonnefon discusses the responses (reporting, among other things, that babies, children, and pregnant women were most likely to be saved), the media frenzy over news of the experiment, and scholarly responses to it. Boosters for driverless cars argue that they will be in fewer accidents than human-driven cars. It's up to humans to decide how many fatal accidents we will allow these cars to have.

This volume provides a tutorial review and evaluation of scientific research on the accuracy and reliability of eyewitness identification. The book starts with the perspective that there are a variety of conceptual and empirical problems with eyewitness identification as a form of forensic evidence, just as there are a variety of problems with other forms of forensic evidence. There is then an examination of the important results in the study of eyewitness memory and the implications of this research for psychological theory and for social and legal policy. The volume takes the perspective that research on eyewitness identification can be seen as the paradigmatic example of how psychological science can be successfully applied to real-world problems.

This valuable book examines the complex psychological processes involved in answering different types of survey questions. Drawing on both classic and modern research from cognitive psychology, social psychology, and survey methodology, the authors examine how survey responses are formulated and they demonstrate how seemingly unimportant features of the survey can affect the answers obtained. The book provides a comprehensive review of the sources of response errors in surveys, and it offers a coherent theory of the relation between the underlying views of the public and the results of public opinion polls. Topics include the comprehension of survey questions, the recall of relevant facts and beliefs, estimation and inferential processes people use to answer survey questions, the sources of the apparent instability of public opinion, the difficulties in getting responses into the required format, and the distortions introduced into surveys by deliberate misreporting.