The Nine Zones of Your Driving Personality

Dr. Leon James
1997-2007

CHART of the Nine Zones of Your Driving Personality

Click on each Phase to see an explanation, then click back to continue with the material below.

For a related article see here.

See also: Dr. Driving's  Three-Step Program for driving personality makeovers.

You can take a self-test based on this classified inventory by clicking here.

See how this Chart is used to classify what behaviors drivers don't like about each other 

Three Phases of Internalizing Your Self-Witnessing

Phase I: Traffic Safety Issues (Zones 1, 2, 3)

Phase II: Self-Control Issues (Zones 4, 5, 6)

Phase III: Social Responsibility Issues (Zones 7, 8, 9)

Look at the CHART of Nine Zones shown above

Phase I -- Traffic Safety Issues (Zones 1, 2, 3)

Within each phase, you will be confronted with changes to make in the three domains. Starting with Phase I, you need to examine your affective traffic safety issues, your cognitive traffic safety issues, and your sensorimotor traffic safety issues. Consider the battles you have to fight within you to drive without violating traffic regulations and safety rules. These are affective battles, represented by this conflict:

respect for regulations
vs.
disregard for authority

It's a simple concept to grasp. You've got to take a stand. Which side are you on? Doing some self-witnessing will prove to you that you have been willing to live with some of your driving errors. You might hedge a little and call them "technical errors," but you're better off simply acknowledging that they are errors. Some examples: you don't mind breaking the speed limit; you don't mind changing lanes without signaling; you don't mind following too close -- even tailgating at times; or you don't mind being rude or menacing to your passengers.

To develop affective safety in driving, you need to become mindful of these things. If you routinely break the speed limit whenever it's convenient, you have little respect for legitimate authority. If you routinely get mad at motorists and passengers, or feel stressed in traffic, you lack self-control in traffic. Look at it again -- this is your dilemma, isn't it?

deficient self-control and disregard for authority
vs.
self-control and respect for regulations

Negative Zone 1 -- Attitude Problems: Lack of Self-Control and Disregard for Authority and Regulations

___ Feeling dislike, contempt, or disdain for traffic regulations or authority figures, including police, traffic officials, and legislators.

___ Experiencing frustration and insecurity in routine driving situations.

___ Feeling impatient with the pace of traffic, feeling that you're being held back.

This is your battle at the affective safety level. This is the affective skill you need to acquire. This is your work in Zone 1. Consider these examples reported by some drivers. How many of them do you agree with? There is always an "Etc." at the end. This is for you to fill in. Keep your own self-witnessing diary, adding to the list as you discover more and more of yourself. Name it the negative part of Zone 1

Positive Zone 1 -- Value-Added Attitude: Respect for Authority, Rules and Regulations

___ Striving to be accurate and to avoid making errors in driving.

___ Having a sense of respect and appreciation for traffic regulations and authority.

___ Wanting to obey traffic signs and laws.

___ Being patient or self-controlled while waiting at traffic lights, stop signs, while someone pulls in or out of a parking space, or in traffic flow delays.

___ Gaining self-confidence in one's driving.

Keep your self-witnessing driving diary with you all day, including in the car. In the course of the day, let your mind wander toward your driving topic and see if you can make a new entry you haven't thought of before. Review your notes often and share them with your designated driving huddle-buddy.

Zone 2 -- Cognitive Safety -- Knowledge of Safety

Driver and traffic safety education is the beginning of our cognitive safety, but we need to continue to be involved in driving self-improvement. Traffic psychology is a continuing educational effort and a lifelong involvement. We commit many types of driving errors because people's judgment and reasoning capacity must persistently be trained. Just as top level athletes continue to train on the basics, drivers must continuously work on their game. The dilemma in Zone 2 is therefore:

untrained and faulty thinking
vs.
knowledge and awareness

Try the self-witnessing exercise of the play-by-play description of one of your driving trips to work or home. Describe out loud (or to yourself) what you notice and how you evaluate it. What kind of mistakes do motorists make? What kind of mistakes do you make? Do you follow the rules of the road that you've memorized for your driving license renewal? Which way do you turn the wheels when parked on a down slope? Who has the right of way at the intersection? Notice how your driving style changes with your mood. Notice how often in practice you disregard some of the principles that you value.

Negative Zone 2 -- Untrained and Faulty Thinking -- Unaware of Safety Principles

___ I believe that driving at the speed limit is too slow for most roads.

___ I think it's better to watch out for police than to slow down.

___ I believe that it's safer to speed than to drive at speed limits.

___ It's my opinion that it's alright to drive 10 to 15 miles above the speed limit.

___ I assume that there is no legal speed limit in some places (e.g., parking lots).

___ I think it's wrong for me to drive at the speed limit when everyone else is going faster.

___ I don't' think lifelong driver education is a good idea.

___ I don't think you need constant improvement in your driving once you've learned how.

Your task is to continue the list. It's very unlikely that you will exhaust the category, so if you think there are no more entries, keep searching through self-witnessing. By extending the lists zone by zone, you are being a practicing traffic psychologist. You are engaging in personal growth and you are maturing in your career as a driver. By making these objective observations on yourself in traffic, you are gathering scientific data. By interpreting these facts about your mind, you are creating explanations and hypotheses that will become your own theory of driving. This theory is inseparable from your theory of self. Self-discovery gained through practicing traffic psychology will affect your relationship to yourself and your relationships with others, including strangers.

While you are noting your errors in reasoning and judgment, you also want to focus on your proficient habits. You can justly be proud of them since they always take effort to acquire and maintain. Keeping a list of the good things you do, think, and feel in traffic is important to help you maintain balance and direction in your driving personality make-over process. Traffic psychology clearly shows the relation between your driving behavior and your self. You may cling to the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde approach (see Chapter 1), but you are not fooling anyone, and your lot is miserable. Why live this way? As you continue working on your driving personality, you are continuing to work on your personal growth. Self-knowledge must include all of the negative and all of the positive elements that form your personality. Self-knowledge gives you the power to self-modify.

Note: You can take a self-test based on this classified inventory by clicking here.

Positive Zone 2 -- Knowledge and Awareness

___ Learning and memorizing driving principles and facts.

___ Observing or noting mistakes in driving.

___ Becoming more aware of your driving actions, thoughts, and feelings.

___ Realizing how your driving behavior is influenced by mood and environment.

___ Mentally rehearsing correct action sequences or principles of good driving.

How many more can you list in the course of six months?

Zone 3 -- Sensorimotor Safety and Alertness

We started with affective safety and attitude (Zone 1) because our thoughts and actions are controlled by our feelings or motives. The original dilemma for drivers as they get into their cars is whether they are going to respect the rules or disregard them when convenient; and, whether they are going to exercise self-control or let go and plead insanity or flakiness. These are the Zone 1 conflicts, and they are moral in nature. Cognitive Safety and Knowledge (Zone 2) can be memorized by anyone, but whether or not we apply what we know in actuality depends on the affective conflict going on in Zone 1. Now, in Zone 3, we are faced with the overt, legal, and social consequences of our driving personality. Sensorimotor safety is the overt consequence of affective and cognitive safety .

Our dilemma in Zone 3 is:

faulty actions and inattention
vs.
correct actions and alertness

Our overt actions in traffic can be unsafe, illegal, or both. We can be relaxed and alert or, relaxed and inattentive. To be inattentive means that you fail to notice visual or auditory clues that help you to make good decisions. Why don't you notice something? Perhaps because you reasoned incorrectly (Zone 2) about the situation, or you were not motivated to understand in detail what was going on (Zone 1). By keeping track of your sensorimotor actions you discover what cognitive (Zone 2) and affective (Zone 1) elements in your driving safety still need to be worked on.

Negative Zone 3 -- Faulty Actions and Inattention

Look at the CHART of Nine Zones

___ Executing an incorrect or illegal act in routine driving situations.

___ Driving with insufficient concentration or with a sense of distraction.

___ Not noticing signs or being insufficiently alert to traffic conditions.

Positive Zone 3 -- Correct Actions and Alertness

___ Performing correct actions in routine driving situations.

___ Paying attention to signs and being alert to other highway users.

___ Keeping-up with traffic without breaking the speed limit.

___ Using verbalizations or self-regulatory sentences as reminders for better self-control and alertness.

___ Expressing appreciation for the good things in driving (comfort, convenience, beauty, importance, etc.).

The first three zones of your driving personality make-over plan concern your driving safety. Since it is a matter of personal growth, this process of improving in safety needs to continue forever. However, besides safety issues (Phase I), there are two more phases in which to work on improvements. Phase II, Self-Control Issues includes Zones 4, 5, and 6.

Phase II -- Self-Control Issues (Zones 4, 5, 6)

Zone 4: Affective Self-Control Issues

For generations we have been taught to be defensive and courteous drivers for the sake of safety. These two principles are designed to protect us from accidents and dangerous exchanges with other motorists. In traffic psychology, we need to look at all three aspects of the self in relation to safety. Beginning with affective safety issues, the dilemma revolves around this:

aggressiveness, risk-taking, and opportunism
vs.
prudence and fairness

It is easy to fall into a comic book traffic persona. You can be into it for years and decades and not realize it! "Aggressive -- who, me? I'm a gentle person, reasonable, compassionate. Opportunistic -- who, me? I don't like being pushy." Phase II self-witnessing in the affective domain of the self unveils for you the transformation that occurs when you get behind the wheel. If you feel rushed and impatient in traffic, then you are tempted to drive aggressively and you take a lot of risks. Your emotions become aggressive, competitive, retaliatory, self-focused. If you get ahead of someone, you feel satisfaction, relief, even elation. If someone else gets ahead of you, you feel annoyed, angry, even depressed. If you perceive someone as blocking your way, you feel indignant, furious, even violent. Of all nine zones, this one may be the easiest to fill-in for many drivers!

Negative Zone 4 -- Emotional Control: Aggressiveness, Risk, and Opportunism

___ Being motivated by a competitive impulse to get ahead of other drivers.

___ Feeling anger or condemnation towards highway users.

___ Feeling intimidated or stigmatized by the actions of other drivers.

___ Wanting to pressure or coerce other drivers.

It's not difficult to imagine the opposite of our typical aggressive and opportunistic driving style. All we need to do is to think of what traffic procedures we would like to have in an ideal setting. Surely we would like fairness, prudence, courtesy, helpfulness, and kindness. This would make everyday life in traffic tolerable, even fun, something to look forward to, like shopping or sight-seeing.

Keep elaborating this ideal setting in your mind and try to enact it for yourself. There is really no reason why you can't. At first, you might think that you're the only such driver in your traffic area. You will stand out like a dock light on a dark lake or like a tree in the desert. You will be the red apple in a basket of green apples. Others can rush and aggress and act-out their bad moods, while you can remain calm, content in not taking risks, and sprinkle your ride with good deeds and social niceties. To be successful, you need to neutralize the delusion we all have that if we don't rush we will get there too late. Prove that this is a delusion to yourself by clocking yourself on familiar trips. Keep track of the actual driving time for each trip and the traffic conditions (light/modrerate/heavy). After two weeks of observation, examine the data you have collected. Look at the ranges in minutes and eliminate the the unusual extremes at the top and bottom 10%. Now you'll see that for 90% of the time, meaning almost always, the range of your timing for trips is very small. Consider the example below for a typical trip from home to work:

The average for the three days is 26 minutes, only three minutes shorter than the longest travel time. You need to consider whether a difference of six minutes between the shortest and longest trip times is worth taking the risks.

For example, it takes us on the average 35 minutes to reach our workplace. The upper range is 41 minutes (early morning and late afternoon traffic) while the lower range is 26 minutes (Sunday traffic). Traffic conditions thus create slow-down conditions that can cost us around 15 minutes at the most. The way we drive yields a much smaller range. This may vary with conditions, but we are convinced from reading hundreds of self-witnessing reports that rushing makes little difference in getting you there sooner or faster. However, it is you who must be convinced, and the best and easiest way of doing this is by clocking yourself under various conditions. You need to do this objectively, systematically and repeatedly, until you have several numbers to average under several conditions (e.g., When I rush in Traffic vs. When I go with the Flow; or, When I Take Chances vs. When I drive with Prudence).

Positive Zone 4 -- Defensiveness, Prudence and Politeness

___ Striving to be fair to other highway users, giving them the same rights you give yourself.

___ Striving to avoid holding-up other drivers or interfering with their goals.

___ Watching out for the potential errors of other highway users

Zone 5 -- Cognitive Self-Control and Judgment

While you are working on your affective safety issues (Zone 4) you quite naturally will focus on the thoughts and reasonings that accompany your acts of aggression or kindness, of risk or prudence. With cognitive self-control issues, the dilemma will revolve around this:

subjective attributions and untrained thinking
vs.
objective attributions and trained reasoning

The word attributions is used by social psychologists to refer to a type of reasoning process that is very common in every day life. For example, someone is late and you are wondering why. What could have happened? In this process you are making "causal attributions" by trying to figure out what caused the person to be late You might think that maybe the person was delayed, or got into an accident, or just forgot about the appointment. These hypotheses in your mind are ways of explaining to yourself what's going on. In traffic we make causal attributions all the time. You will see this in your self-witnessing protocols.

Suppose you see the car in front of you signal a right turn when there is no intersection or driveway nearby. You might conclude that the driver wants to slow down or possibly stop or park. This would be a normal conclusion and we would call it an objective attribution, appropriate to the situation. You might possibly think that the driver signaled by mistake and is unaware of it. This is also possible though it would be a mistake to just assume it without further evidence. For instance, you might watch a motorist moving over to the right, and observe that the right turn indicator stays on. You would then conclude that the driver forgot to turn it off. This might be true, though it is also possible that the drivier is planning anothermove to the right.

There is often a fusize="3y line between explanations that are likely and reasonable, and those that are idiosyncratic and off the wall. We use the phrase "subjective attributions" for explanations that are biased, egocentric, and self-serving. "Objective attributions" are task-oriented and reasonable. Your self-witnessing reports will reveal to you the nature of your subjective attributions in traffic. It is common, typical, and normal to make subjective attributions just as it is common to get angry or feel impatient or make mistakes. These are common, but we want to reduce or eliminate them as much as we can.

Negative Zone 5 -- Subjective Attributions and Untrained Reasoning

___ Making up prejudiced, unfounded or presumptuous explanations for others' driving behavior.

___ Misinterpreting the causes of one's own driving actions, rationalizing or justifying one's faulty behavior.

___ Blaming others for causing your own frustrations in a driving situation.

___ Finding a personal justification for doing the wrong thing (e.g., speeding or failing to yield when in a hurry).

___ Thinking that you are isolated in your car and that no one can see you.

___ Indulging in fantasy games with other motorists.

Positive Zone 5 -- Objective Attributions

___ Making up reasonable explanations for the intentions or behaviors of other highway users.

___ Giving objective reasons for your own driving actions or feelings.

___ Seeing things through the eyes or perspective of other highway users, driving a mile in their chair.

___ Analyzing a driving situation to make sense of what's going on.

Zone 6 -- Sensorimotor Control or Calmness

Affective self-control in the form of form of prudence or defensiveness (Zone 4) combine with objective attributions (Zone 5) to produce sensorimotor acts of self-control. The dilemma in this zone consists in learning to control, train, and shape your driving body -- its overt actions, sensations and appearance:

tense, nervous exchanges and overreaction
vs.
relaxed exchanges and calmness

This is where you will be discovering how you appear to other motorists and passengers. Some of the self-witnessing reports we have seen made use of a high-tech approach, using a video camera operated by a driving huddle-buddy. This is very useful to show the expressions on your face and the movements of your arms and hands. Of course your voice is also recorded so that you can witness the quality and content of your verbalizations in traffic. This also works well with a tape recorder that you can leave on throughout a ride.

Taking notes at the end of the ride can also help you make an inventory of the sentences you say to yourself in traffic. We recommend a technique called speech act analysis that consists of listing in one column each verbalization that you made, and writing an explanation for each entry in the second column. Your interpretation explains the context of your speech act and what it was meant to accomplish.

For example, your notes show that you curse several times on every trip. What was happening each time you cursed? The explanations in the second column might say, "Had to slam on the brakes" or "Just missed the green light." You begin to see a pattern. You get emotionally upset when you have to re-adjust your driving intentions, and this shows externally as swearing. Many people operate on the theory that swearing lets you blow off steam and so it's a good thing. But this theory might be totally false and based on convenient fiction (subjective attribution). Swearing is a direct outcome of the negative affect (intolerance, irrationality) that is present. As long as this negative affect is tolerated, swearing is a natural outcome. Suppressing it may seem to you worse than letting it fly. But the solution is for you to refuse to allow the presence of negative affect, by inhibiting it, and substituting something positive instead (tolerance, respect, civility, sympathy).

Negative Zone 6 -- Tense, Volatile Exchanges and Over-reaction

___ Insulting other highway users or passengers with words or gestures.

___ Overreacting to another driver's rude behavior.

___ Complaining about other highway users or denigrating (bad-mouthing) them.

___ Pressuring or coercing another highway user or passenger.

To accomplish a personality make-over in zone 6, you need to take charge of your affective domain. This is done by identifying with the opposite persona, which means searching and finding within yourself higher motives that are based in your love for moral strength, flexibility, fairmindedness, respect for the dignity of others, and being delighted by plesantries, niceties, and agreement between people. These are the new affective states that replace the old, grouchy ones. Once the bad guys are gone, the good guys can move in. The urge to swear and be offensive will be gone. Another big step in your personal growth!

Positive Zone 6 -- Relaxed, Peaceful Exchanges and Calmness

___ Remaining calm and resisting pressure in the face of provocation.

___ Recovering quickly after becoming upset with another driver.

___ Inhibiting aggressive or denigrating gestures or words against other highway users or passengers.

___ Maintaining a good mood while driving.

___ Expressing appreciation for the good things in driving (comfort, convenience, beauty, importance)

Phase III -- Responsibility Issues

When you get here in your actual plan you are already a practicing witness in Phase I (safety issues) and Phase II (self-control issues). Remember that your purpose is to get going in all nine zones. When your driving personality make-over plan is fully operational, you'll be active throughout the range of your traffic personality. This process continues forever, but don't let that depress you. The beginning of each zone can be pretty rough emotionally and challenging intellectually. But the good news is that it gets better and better, so that you begin to deal with the positive aspects of your personality and character. The traffic environment is socially complex and can be a rich cultural resource. There are opportunities for community-building and spiritual connections with other human beings. The positive aspects of human relationships can be explored, mapped, and evolved to higher civilized levels.

Zone 7 -- Affective Responsibility, Ethics, Altruism, and Spirituality

Freedom and responsibility are closely connected on the road. The freedom to act responsibly is one of the highest forms of creative self-expression. We act with responsibility when we fight our base instincts for the sake of others, so that we may not injure them in any way -- physically, emotionally, or morally. When we fail to exercise this freedom, we remain in a state of slavery to alien impulses within -- desires to retaliate, punish, coerce, and exploit others for the sake of one's egotism and delight in overpowering others. The dilemma for you in this zone will consist of these two tendencies within you:

egotism and deficient conscience
vs.
altruism and morality

As you enter this zone in your self-witnessing focus, you are beginning to deal with the deepest aspect of your character. There is no doubting the fact that we start our driving career oriented towards the self rather than the other way round. As un-reformed drivers we are egotistical. Our actions in traffic indicate that, in our own mind, we come before others. This is called egotism. The other side of this coin is conscience. Psychologists talk about a "deficient" conscience when the individual regularly fails to show guilt or remorse for injurious behaviors to others.

As angry, egotistical, crazy drivers we act collectively like a nation with deficient conscience. Each of us has a moral responsibility to fight against this enemy within. Your victory will be our victory and vice versa.

The opposite affective orientation is called altruism. Most people are capable of both types of orientations, but in different situations. When you are having a polite and agreeable exchange with someone, you are oriented affectively towards altruism. In your mind, the other person's feelings come before your own. You are trying to impress the person, so you are careful not to offend or insult. You smile and stand straight, even though you might feel tired or stressed out. You are exercising the freedom to be nice and decent, when you could have just given in to your impulse and acted unpleasant or callous. Your altruistic motive gives you the altruistic orientation which allows you to be compassionate and civilized. It is your choice, your victory, your reward. And we all get to share in it. You might like to check out DrDriving's Random Acts of Kindness for Drivers Page.

Negative Zone 7 -- Egotism and Deficient Conscience

___ Feeling vengeful or having the desire to be injurious to other

highway users.

___ Wanting to retaliate against others.

___ Disregarding or minimizing the feelings and rights of other highway

users.

___ Denying one's guilt or being hostile when told of one's faulty

actions.

___ Ignoring the comfort and safety of passengers.

Altruism and morality are closely connected affective states. In their role as mothers and fathers, people are used to experiencing altruistic affections for their children, especially when they are still small. To parents, the children come first in the sense that they regularly give up things they want, so that their children could have what they want or is good for them. In other settings, these same individuals can be egotistically motivated, pointing to an area where conscience has to be re-invigorated and cared for.

Social psychologists use the expression "zero-sum-game" to refer to competitive situations (like ball games or finances), because we feel that whatever others gain we lose and whatever we gain they lose. There is only so much to around, so that when you add up the gains and the losses, the result should be zero. The opposite setting is called "cooperative" or "organic" and is like the expression 'having your cake and eating it,' because everyone wins or, you win either way. My winnings are yours and yours are mine. Or, I'll watch your back and you watch mine. Traffic can be this kind of team work and mutual support when we apply ourselves to strengthening our altruistic and moral resources.

Positive Zone 7 -- Kindness, Forgiving, and Altruism

___ Applying a moral or religious precept to one's own driving actions,

thoughts, and impluses.

___ Being fearful of causing injury or damage to someone.

___ Caring about others' feelings.

___ Being desirous to facilitate the intentions or goals of other

highway users.

Zone 8 -- Cognitive Responsibility, Ethics, Mental Health, and Wisdom

In the egotistical state, our thoughts in traffic are different in kind from what fills our mind in the altruistic state. If you see other motorists as "the enemy," you are helpless to stop your reasoning process from degenerating into some form of craziness. These types of thoughts are "negative dramatizations" because they're imaginary thought sequences we've acquired by habit that have become the norm on the roads. Making-up dramatic scenarios in traffic is a form of "cognitive irresponsibility" because it gives you an excuse to

• chase someone in reckless pursuit
• pressure other drivers by tailgating
• curse and make angry gestures at other drivers
• hate other drivers
• ridicule other drivers when they make mistakes

Sometimes driving situations play tricks on you and it's easy to imagine that drivers are tailgating you, when they're actually following too close because they're just being inattentive. Suppose a motorist cuts into your lane a little too close ahead of you than is safe. You have a choice of which "dramatizations" you will construct when you automatically interpret the motorist's action.

• Should I retaliate? It's not worth it.
• I can't let others treat me this way. Oh well, they probably don't realize what's happening.
• It's outrageous! It's routine, so I'll deal with it.
• Someone should teach them a lesson, they deserve it. I make mistakes too.

Negative dramatizations lead you to think that the driver did it on purpose to express unhappiness with your driving. You can counteract negative stories with positive ones that will lift your spirits instead of upsetting and depressing you. You don't enjoy riding in a negative state. Don't you think you deserve better? So the defense against negative dramatizations is to make-up positive ones.

Did that car just cut in too close to me? That's pretty dangerous. Well, probably you weren't paying attention. Or maybe you're nervous. I hope you make it.

Clearly then, your dilemma in Zone 8 is one between negative dramatizations and mental health:

negative dramatizations and cognitive irresponsibility
vs.
positive dramatizations and mental health

Positive Zone 8 -- Positive Dramatizations and Mental Health


___ Imagining or predicting the consequences of one's driving actions or those of others.
___ De-dramatizing or neutralizing one's negative feelings in a driving situation.
___ Making-up driving scenarios that are protective of people and property.
___ Using facts (such as accident rates) to re-assert one's commitment to safe driving.

To achieve mental health in traffic you can develop your ability to think positively about driving incidents. You need to save yourself from negative thoughts. It's common for drivers to be enjoy egotistical feelings in traffic (Zone 7). If you're unwilling to give them up, then you're going to be a victim of negative feelings on the road. Are you going to be one of them?

Negative Zone 8 -- Negative Dramatizations, Delusions, and Cognitive Irresponsibility

___ Making-up mad driving scenarios.
___ Attaching preposterous symbolic significance to driving exchanges (e.g., being overtaken is reprehensible).
___ Thinking that one is being personally singled out as the object of attack or condemnation by other drivers.
___ Denigrating the character of drivers by their physical appearance or that of their car.
___ Thinking that you're isolated in your car and that no one can see you.
___ Indulging in negative fantasies about other drivers.

Are you willing to give up the negative dramatizations that force you to drive through traffic hell every day? Good! If you've been practicing Zone 7 self-witnessing and you're re-orienting yourself towards altruism. Your dramatizations will quickly change to positive, and your feelings will become forgiving, harmless, and virtuous.

Zone 9 -- Sensorimotor Responsibility and Kindness

Congratulations! You have reached the last zone of your driving personality make-over experience. You are now consciously active in all areas of your driving self. This begins a new phase in your driving career. The dilemma you have to face in this zone is this:

being stressed and dislocated
vs.
being cooperative and integrated

Sensorimotor ethics is the culmination of all the previous dilemmas in driving and rests upon all the others. Chances are you are still in the stress and depression phase of driving. Perhaps you grieve over this in your driving stories, perhaps you're not consciously in touch with these feelings when you drive. It may seem odd to say that it's your responsibility to enjoy driving, or, that it's irresponsible of you to feel stress in traffic. And yet is this not what it really amounts to? Your freedom, your responsibility?

You might think that driving stress is something that the traffic environment imposes on you. But this is incorrect reasoning. Stress is a reaction in you produced by negative dramatizations. When you meet the identical situation with positive dramatizations, you experience not stress, but enjoyment, light-heartedness, even humor and fun. Therefore stress is something you yourself produce, not the traffic environment.

Negative Zone 9 -- Cruelty, Competitiveness and Combativeness

___ Letting my bad mood or apathy influence my driving for the worse.

___ Treating other drivers as competitors or enemies.

___ Acting tough and threatening to make sure I'm being respected.

___ Berating myself for driving errors (being over critical or judgmental).

___ Berating others for driving errors (being over critical or judgmental).

___ Acting agitated, fidgety and nervous while driving.

___ Expressing annoyance because I missed a green light or parking spot.

___ Tailgating and chasing motorists to teach them a lesson.

___ Being frenzied because the traffic flow is too slow.

___ Sensing heart palpitations and other physical symptoms.

___ Gripping the wheel too hard or tensing the shoulders and other parts of the body.

___ Throwing a fit because someone else got there first.

___ Yelling and gesturing at passengers, pedestrians, and other drivers.

___ Being gleeful when a motorist gets stuck behind while you get ahead.

Positive Zone 9 -- Kindness, Enjoyment and Creativity

___ Enjoying the drive, the scenery, the deliberate and controlled movements in driving.

___ Enjoying sentiments of good will towards other road users.

___ Experiencing a heightened sense of consciousness and relaxed good feeling during driving.

___ Engaging in productive work while driving such as reflection, planning, making resolutions, self-witnessing, listening to taped lectures, talking on the car phone, and so on.

___ Maintaining a good mood while driving.

___ Practicing traffic goodness through positive thinking and forgiveness.

___ Expressing my appreciation for the good things in driving and transportation (safety, comfort, convenience, beauty, importance).

___ Strengthening my self-esteem through positive acts of charity toward other road users.

Since this is the crown of all the other zones, and rests upon them, you can use it as a convenient measure for how well you are progressing in your overall driving personality make-over attempt. The entire attempt then comes down to this question:

Do you enjoy traffic and use it creatively, or, do you hate it, and find it stressful and stultifying?

Mapping Yourself in the Nine Zones

As you work on yourself in the nine zones it will be quite natural for you to have the desire to share this interest and involvement with those who ride with you regularly. You can also introduce the subject with your friends. See how they react to it. Chances are you will see yourself as an advocate for traffic psychology. You will want to give traffic psychology away to them and all your loved ones. Possibly you might serve as their designated driving huddle buddy. Help them through the steps. Help them become what you have become -- a reformed driver, a participatory driver, a practicing traffic psychologist.

Over the past 15 years we have read hundreds of self-witnessing reports written by road users engaged in a driving personality makeover attempt. As psychologists and information scientists, we are trained to analyze such reports and summarize them in an organized inventory or taxonomy. The nine zones of self-witnessing exercises are patterned after the experience of the traffic witnesses. If we did an adequate job of presentation, you should be able to recognize and confirm every single item in this ordered inventory. Rather than telling you something new, we are summarizing and reviewing what you no doubt already know as a road user. Think of it as a mental map of who you are as a driver and who you could be, if you wanted to change.

Though each driver is a unique individual, the traffic setting creates similar forces on all road users. This becomes obvious when you compare it people's biography or life events. Despite the uniqueness and the individuality of people's lives, they are composed of similar units like birthdays, growing up, going to school, getting into fights, getting into an accident, getting married, flossing your teeth, writing a letter, and so on. You can think of them as various stones you can step on, as you wish or not, in your life progression. As you compare pople's lives, you see similarity and overlap of units of life such as these.

The units of your traffic life are are also cultural elements that we all share. Many people fail to recognize this. After all, we are encapsulated in our driving cocoon made up of our thoughts and feelings. These are internal activities, visible to yourself only. The private world of the driver can be lonely and frightening, raked by emotional storms and suspicious thoughts. It is normal to think that your thoughts and feelings in traffic are somehow peculiar or unique to you. At the very least, you feel you have created them. They feel part of you. And yet they are cultural, standardized units of experience shared in common by all drivers.

Look around you in a crowd of people. They all shop in the same few stores available in the neighborhood, yet they are all dressed differently. Should you get mentally confused, you might think that everyone makes their own clothes, or that the clothes are part of each individual. Your thoughts and feelings in traffic are social and cultural events despite their existence within you. In a real sense, you shop around for available items, and you choose the stones you step on, when you are creating your personality through your choices and habits.

We expect that driving personas will vary in style in different ethnic groups and cultures. Your driving personality is a cultural object, or resource. It can be identified, described, inventoried, and placed in a taxonomy along with other such elements. The inventory, or taxonomy, of behaviors in traffic makes a map or catalog where you can find all the elements that make up your current driving style. You can also find all the elements of the new driving personality that you crave for.

The taxonomy we have constructed is based on more than two decades of research using the self-witnessing method in traffic. Our analysis of hundreds of self-witnessing reports helped us create the 9 zones of a driving personality make-over plan. The purpose of this taxonomy is to help you keep track of all the areas of your driving personality. You will note that only a few items are presented for each zone. Though more items could be presented, you should realize that each of the 9 zones is an open field, meaning that there is no fixed limit to the number of items that can be put in it.

Imagine thousands, even millions of road users keeping track of their traffic life by recording their feelings, thoughts, and actions in these 9 zones. Now imagine combining everyone's list of items into one giant list divided into 9 parts. We would call this giant list the "virtual taxonomy of traffic psychology." This taxonomy contains the knowledge of traffic psychology. It exists virtually in the mind of drivers. By relating your traffic life to this taxonomy you are undergoing an experience similar to those of countless others. A spiritual, moral, and national bond is established between us. Though still private in our world of thoughts and feelings, we are no longer alone. The virtual presence of all is felt by each. Traffic hell has been transformed into traffic paradise.

Three Steps to a Driving Personality Make-Over

The process of initiating a driving personality make-over plan can be summarized as an endless cycle of 3 steps.

Step 1: Committing Yourself

Step 2: Building Your Self-Witnessing Inventory

Step 3: Applying Self-Modification Techniques

Next: Begin Again

The first step of commitment comes as a result of being exposed to the topic of traffic psychology. Perhaps someone you know is reading this book and talks about it. Perhaps you read a magazine article about it or caught the end of a talk show discussing it. Maybe one of your passengers anonymously mailed you a copy of this book (was that a hint, you wonder?). We recommend that you read this book in its entirety before starting your plan. You can then make a commitment with full knowledge of what's involved. As you'll discover, this is a lifelong commitment, which means that you need to endlessly re-dedicate yourself to this task over and over again.

The second step is to start your career as a "society's witness" for life on the nation's roads and streets. Your self-witnessing begins the process of building your own inventory of your feelings, thoughts, and actions in traffic. There are 9 zones of traffic personality elements. Your task as a witness is to add as many items as you can within each of the nine zones of your traffic life. Each item you add to the list will come from an actual observation you've made of yourself. Start with zone 1, move to zone 2, and so on. When you get to zone 9, you will be actively witnessing yourself in all areas of your traffic life. Then for the first time you begin your life as a practicing traffic psychologist.

The third step is selectively applying various self-modification techniques to individual behavior items in your self-witnessing inventory. Suppose you notice a habit of unconsciously following too close, you can't just make a resolution and think yourself out of the problem. You need to devise a systematic plan to re-train your automatic driving habit. Many such techniques are described throughout this book. Use whatever works for you, or make-up your own. Additional asistance in self-modification techniques can be found in psychology and self-help books. One useful source we recommend is a book titled Self-Modification of Behavior by David Watson and Roland Tharp. After each self-modification effort you need to go back to Step 1, re-commit yourself, and continue your self-witnessing until ready for another self-modification effort. And so the cyclical process begins again.

The nine zones of the self-witnessing taxonomy involve the three domains of human behavior in traffic: affective (your feelings), cognitive (your thoughts), and sensorimotor (your physical sensations or actions). The nine zones are arranged in a progressive order of internalization. The further you go in your self-witnessing attempt (from Zone 1 to 9), the deeper the issues you have to deal with in your self. However, as you move deeper, you don't stop your efforts in the earlier phases, but continue to work within those areas of your self. When you get to Zone 9, you'll be active in all areas simultaneously. You then begin your existence as a full fledged, practicing traffic psychologist. You are then part of a process that continues throughout your career as a traffic person.