In road rage, small infractions can easily escalate to disproportionate responses.

People react far more strongly to social slights than they do to small acts of kindness.

It is true that people ‘pass forward’ small kindnesses paid to themselves, but they also pass on small slights with much more venom.

People tend to see courtesy as normal, so receiving it only slightly increases their own courteous behaviour.

Discourteous behaviour, however, can provoke strong irritation and a desire to punish others.

The psychological phenomenon may help to explain instances of road rage where apparently small infractions can easily escalate into disproportionate responses.

Professor Boaz Keysar, the study’s first author, said:

“For instance in driving, if you are kind and let someone go in front of you, that driver may be considerate in response.

But if you cut someone off, that person may react very aggressively, and this could escalate to road rage.

The one receiving the slight cannot imagine that the slighter lacks that appreciation.

And so it goes, because of such differential perception, they respond more and more strongly.

Small slights could escalate to unbelievable, irrational feuds.”

Small slights escalate

In the study, 40 participants exchanged money with one another.

The experimenters tested the effect of both giving and taking on how generous people were.

The results showed that perceiving that others were giving to them made people a little more generous to others.

By contrast, taking was linked to progressively higher levels of taking later.

Professor Keysar said:

“Acts of giving are perceived as more generous in social exchanges than objectively identical acts of taking.

Taking tends to escalate.

Reciprocity appears to operate on an exchange rate that assigns value to the meaning of events, in a fashion that encourages pro-social exchanges.”

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The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Keysar et al., 2019).