I live in the LA metro area and do a lot of driving. My work is about 26 miles from my house so I’m on the freeways a lot. When trying to pass people, there is a phenomenon I’ve noticed.
If I want to drive 80mph, and I’m coming up on someone who is driving 75, and I try to pass him doing 80, then he will most likely speed up to somewhere around 80 too.
Why does this happen? One answer might be that people are jerks who don’t want to let you get around them. This is probably the case at least some times.
But my guess is that the answer is something more benign. I think people subconsciously adapt to their surroundings, so that if the driver who was doing 75 finds himself in the company of someone doing 80, he will naturally adjust his own speed up to match the other. I feel like this is the correct hypothesis to explain the phenomenon, and it avoids attributing malice to the other person, even if that might be the case in some instances. There’s probably a technical name for this phenomenon, but I’ll just call it subconscious adaptation.
Subconscious adaptation takes place when there are slight changes to our surroundings and we adjust to them without needing to consciously think about what we’re doing.
What I’ve found in general is that to pass someone doing just a bit slower than me, I need to speed up to maybe 85… or even close to 90…. to pass the driver. At that point, the driver becomes consciously aware that the guy passing him is going much faster, and that attempting to match that speed is outside his own comfort zone of 75, so he just lets him go. Then when I’m past the other driver, I slow back down to my comfort zone of 80 and everyone is good.
Speeding up took the scenario from one where the other driver subconsciously adapts, to one where the other driver has to consciously make a decision, which, if he is not driven by malice, means he can just let me pass him since I’m not interfering with his preferred speed.
(If you know LA freeways, you might be thinking: where and when are you able to get up to 80mph??!!
5 freeway southbound from Whittier to Irvine around 5:30 to 6a. Afternoon…. no. Although I typically leave the office around 3, so there are some areas northbound around Anaheim where the traffic could allow that.)
I’ve observed this behavior over years- that cars when tend to speed up when another car tends to pass them by doing only slightly faster, and will not try to match speed when the passing car goes 10-15 miles an hour faster. That’s the phenomenon.
In attempting to understand this so I can pass other cars- I observe the phenomenon, then I formulate a hypothesis as to why this is. Then I test the hypothesis over time to see if it can accurately predict the results.
Now the phenomenon- cars speeding up slightly to match your speed- is an observable fact. That’s not in dispute. But the motive as to why is something I can’t really test. I can make some guesses as to why given the actions, but I just don’t have access to people’s minds so that I can test motives. The only thing I have access to is the phenomenon itself. I DO, however, have access to MY motives. I have to acknowledge that my hypothesis is ultimately about the motives for why people in general act in this way, and that any insights I have into motives come from my own motives more than others.
I’m sure some people would immediately jump to the conclusion that people are just jerks. I don’t like that conclusion. I, of course, know it’s true sometimes because I too have just been a jerk sometimes. But I’ve also caught myself speeding up, or slowing down, when I’m not consciously paying attention to my speed. If I’m caught up in conversation, I’ll just be driving along with no real concern for trying to maintain a specific speed.
From my own experience then, I project that others are largely the same in their motives. But of course I have no way of testing hypotheses concerning others’ motives. All I can observe are the actions.
I could reason that actions are produced by motives, and that any actions seen therefore are the result of motives.
But in fact, my own experience tells me that not all actions are in fact produced by conscious decisions involving motive. Sometimes my actions are the result of unconscious, or maybe I should say subconscious stimuli- I’m just doing things by rote.
My response to the phenomenon- going 10-15mph faster than the person I’m trying to pass, is my own effort to move his mind from subconscious adaptation to the conscious decision, in which case I assume that he will decide I’m moving too fast to bother with. The fact that this hypothesis seems to, for the most part, accurately predict what will happen, tells me I’m probably correct. Of course we’re talking about people here, so there’s truly no telling what you’re gonna get in any one instance, but generally….