Comment: Road rage and reasoning about responsibility

• Jurisdiction: South Africa
• Author: Shannon Hoctor
• Date: 24 May 2019
• Citation: (2001) 14 SACJ 195
• Pages: 195-205
• Published date: 24 May 2019

COMMENTS • AANTEKENINGE

Road rage and reasoning

about responsibility

SHANNON HOCTOR

University of Port Elizabeth

1 Introduction

Road rage is merely a new term for a problem which has existed for some

time (see N Faith

Crash: The Limits of Car Safety

(1997) 126, who relates that

the poet Lord Byron had an altercation with a carriage driver who cut him off

on the road), but the increasingly widespread reporting of incidents involving

drivers giving vent to their anger and frustration on the road has popularised

the classification. Whilst the exact ambit of the term is rendered somewhat

vague by misuse, it is clear that road rage is a product of the confluence of a

number of factors — aggression, increasing frustration, the feeling of power

associated with driving—which converge to create a cauldron of stressful

conditions:

The stress from other road-users, people cutting you up, driving too close ...

[w]hether it's outside stress from normal living, needing to get to an appointment,

the stress you bring with you in terms of arguments, what happens is that there's a

number of these stresses that a driver faces. Stress raises your heart-rate, blood

pressure and endorphin levels, which means that you're going to react to situations

a lot more, so that when you're actually confronted with a minor stressful incident

on the road, you've already had enough so your reaction can be completely out of

proportion. So if somebody drives a little bit close to you, you've got all this stress

in your body and you want to lash out to take away the thing that's causing you

stress—and what you have to lash out with is a car' (Psychologist Conrad King,

cited by Faith

op cit

125).

It seems further that a contributory factor towards the arousal of hostility is

the fact that the subjective experience of occupation or ownership of a car

not only creates a feeling of distinctiveness and control over the car, it is also

instrumental in fostering a sense of attachment and pride which forms part of

the composition of the self-identity (H Viljoen et al

Environmental

195

(2001) 14 SACJ 195

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