"Personality of a car" an indicator of road rage

Does your car have a good personality? Is it a "he" or a "she"?

The answers to those questions might indicate your propensity for road rage. In fact, how people view the "personality" of their cars might be a better indication of how aggressive they'll be behind the wheel than their own personalities, says researcher Jacob Benfield of Colorado State University.

Benfield and his colleagues surveyed 204 car-owning college students to measure the degree to which they gave human characteristics to their rides — call it auto-anthropomorphism. They found that about half of all students thought of their car as being masculine or feminine, and more than one in four had named their cars — results consistent with earlier studies of car owners.

The psychologists also gave students standard personality tests and measured their propensity for road rage or aggressive driving. Then they went a step further and asked the students to repeat the personality tests and "imagine that your vehicle had a personality. Now rate the following items based on the vehicle's personality."

They found that drivers who thought of their cars as being male or female "scored significantly higher than non-gender-vehicle drivers on verbal aggression, physical aggression, use of vehicle, driving anger, and pejorative labeling/verbally aggressive thinking," Benfield and his colleagues report in a forthcoming issue of Personality and Individual Differences.

When the researchers examined the results of the personality tests, they found that the personality of the car and driver were far from a perfect match. Moreover, they found that the perceived personality of the car sometimes was a better predictor of aggressive driving tendencies than the owner's personality.

For example, people who thought of their car as friendly were more likely to behave better on the road, even if they were not particularly friendly people. "If people perceive their Corolla to be a jerk, they might drive more aggressively than if they thought their Mustang had a nice personality," Benfield said.

People who gave their cars names were no more or less aggressive on the road than those who didn't. That's a surprise, given some of the names the students told researchers they gave their cars.

Among Benfield's favorites: Lolita, the Mini-Pimp and the Sweat-Box of Death.