The study made some strong remarks about the kind of people who would modify their car’s exhaust. If psychopathy and sadism aren’t bad enough, apparently loud truck owners would do even worse.
- A professor in Ontario, Canada, has released results of a study of people’s attitudes toward loud vehicles.
- Having asked undergraduate business students whether they think such vehicles are “cool,” the result, not totally surprisingly, was that many of them do.
- Respondents also scored high on the “psychopathy and sadism” scale, but the study was only for cars. Truck and motorcycle owners, the study suggests, might score even worse.
A new study by Western University in Ontario says that if you’ve got a car with a modified exhaust system, odds are you’re a guy and probably also psychotic and sadistic. Slapping a Cherry Bomb glasspack on your Monte Carlo doesn’t (necessarily) mean you’re a Ted Bundy–level psycho, but the data someone points to a personality that enjoys inflicting unpleasantness on others. The study—catchily titled, “A desire for a loud car with a modified muffler is predicted by being a man and higher scores on psychopathy and sadism”—was commissioned by professor Julie Aitken Schermer, who heard many a loud car in London, Ontario, and wondered what kind of person would want their car exhaust to be louder than normal. She probably could have saved a lot of time by simply looking up Cadillac Escalade-V registrations. …
Yes, going out of the way to make something more annoying by imposing loud sounds on everyone around them is like yelling at everyone.
It’s loud when you have to release the back pressure of an exhaust with mufflers to scavenge more power by using a less restrictive muffler and it’s actually more fuel efficient. If you have a large turbo, you can actually overheat your engine because there’s not enough flow to release the heat. Sometimes people are assholes and like loud mufflers without having tune or supporting modifications. Harleys are loud just to be loud and have no power. Supercars are loud because they have more power. Hyundai Ionic N electric vehicles are loud just to be loud and pretend it’s an internal combustion engine.
(Obligatory acknowledgement that “psychotic” is not an accurate description of what the study or journal article said, that was an erroneous description by Car & Driver. “Sociopathic” or “sadistic” might be more accurate, based on the study.)
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Yes, I was going to comment that this sounds “sociopathic”, but they didnt actually inclde that in the paper.
I wonder if its also correlated with a likelihood to drive at excess speed in built up areas, use mobile phone whilst driving, or otherwise things risk the safety of those other than the perpetrator.
“New study confirms that my worldview is correct”
Yeah fuck cars but this is dumb af. Who cares why people like loud cars, what matters is that we shouldn’t be allowing them.
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Truck and motorcycle owners, the study suggests, might score even worse.
From my anecdotal and personal evidence, I can confirm that every biker that makes their exhaust extra loud (which is illegal in Brazil, btw) is a fucking asshole.
There is a special place in hell for the guy in my apartment complex that starts up his motorcycle at 6:30am just to leave it there, loudly idling, for a good half hour before he finally drives off
Sounds like it would violate a noise ordinance and that he’s providing ample time for cops to come harass him.
Hopefully the police don’t murder people at random there. In Holland we have civil servants who are not the police who will issue fines in cases like this, which seems sensible.
Yeah I’m not advocating police brutality. Just tickets/fines will do
I had a neighbor like that when I was a kid. Drove me nuts. Not at 6:30 am, but he would just leave it there idling for an hour.
RRAAAHBBBLUBLUBLUBLUB
I’ve got an aftermarket resonator that I replaced my stock muffler with. It enhances some of the noises the car makes to give it a better, bass-y, rumbly sound (while also improving performance a small amount by reducing back pressure, but I’m not sure how much that makes a difference since I have catalytic converters well before the resonator).
But I was careful to find one that made the car sound good but not LOUD. Because I cannot stand people who run a straight pipe or muffler/cat delete on neighborhood streets.
Do whatever you want on a circuit, but that car should not be used where people live. Same with your modded Harley that’s louder than a jet, or your “off-road” truck that’s never seen a spec of dirt but sounds like a goddamn volcano.
I’ve got a similar after-market performance exhaust and I like it because it’s quiet except for when I want it to be loud, which I reserve for special occasions when I don’t think I’d bother anybody. And even then people say it’s not terribly loud from the outside.
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But now we can say “Scientifically speaking, they are attention seeking morons.”
No! They are not! That was the exact hypothesis that was DISPROVEN. They are not attention seeking, they are sadistic and trying to hurt people. They don’t want people’s attention, they want people to suffer.
I hate loud noises more than anything. If I were a dictator, I would make it open season on people with loud cars or motorcycles. Just on-sight, consequence-free murder. It would still be legal to mod your car or bike like that, you would just have to accept that everyone will be permitted to kill you.
Think of all the gun shot noise! You haven’t thought of the gun shot noise, Dee!
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If that’s what it takes to be able to sleep at night in the city without hearing assholes with modded cars doing donuts and running from cops :D
There are many steps to take before calling for the deaths of annoying people
Psst… I don’t actually want to kill people, I’m being facetious!
Sounds like you’re not a city person.
obligatory cities arent loud cars are loud. cities without cars are quiet
No, I love the city, I just hate these individuals lol. The two are not inherently comorbid, it depends on where you go.
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Yes
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What a dumb article and subsequent post. I’m anti-carbrain too, but this copium is at OD levels
The article was funny; the study was actually the kinda dumb part.
Funny that this came out of London Ontario, one of the most carbrained cities of its size in North America (I grew up there).
Not Just Bike’s - Fake London?
Yeah, same city.
Eh, the study design seems sus. It seems she hypothesized that such people may be psychopathic and lead with a survey which confirmed as such. Survey design is super tricky for psychological research.
Moreover, the students responding to the survey are not the car owners proper, instead these students are car enthusiasts. The level of car modding or gear headedness of the responder is required to lend credence to the study results.
Could someone comment on the effect sizes observed in the study? I can’t look it up right now. But the above are just my initial impressions, so happy to be corrected
I’m only going to bother reading the first paragraph of your comment since you didn’t read much either.
Their hypothesis before the experiment was that people who liked loud mufflers were NARCISSISTIC, not PSYCHOTIC. The results disproved their hypothesis and supported the new one.
To elaborate, they expected that these people liked attracting attention and having people looking at them, thinking about them. What they found was that this wasn’t the motivation, and rather, these people wanted to hurt others. They knew what they were doing was unpleasant and undesired, and that is why they do it. It’s very different than narcissists, who want to be liked and don’t go out of their way to hurt people for their own enjoyment.
the present study predicted that each dark trait would positively correlate with the loud car scale aggregate, and because typically modifications to vehicles represent criminal activity, it was predicted that sadism and psychopathy would positively predict the aggregate of the car items.
To me it seems like they’re saying “predicted” when they meant “hypothesized”.
Here are the questions they used:
The items were: “My car is an extension of what makes me a person”, “I think loud cars are really cool”, and “If I could, I would make my car louder with muffler modification”. Items were responded to using the following response key: 1 – strongly disagree, 2 – somewhat disagree, 3 – neither agree nor disagree, 4 – somewhat agree, or 5 – strongly agree.
I think what’s missing from the survey design are questions which explore intent, like “I would use a loud muffler when people are sleeping”. I also think the “makes me a person” and “really cool” wording is ambiguous because the answers are not necessarily related to one’s personality. For example “makes me a person” could refer to maybe “helps me achieve survival” to someone, and “really cool” could mean anything from deep interest hobby to expressing admiration of other people’s abilities.
The other issue is that their sample is only business students, so it’s not representative of the entire male population.
I think maybe they released this pilot to gather initial impressions, so it makes sense to be critical and make suggestions for improvements
Edit I think another issue is that people in general don’t understand the disposition of the loud muffler enthusiast, and the approach in this study is starting out with the assumption that the motivation is dark tetrad.
You’re right to be sceptical. The paper is poorly written, and overstates many of the results they found. The correlations identified between the car score and the dark tetrad scores aren’t really very high, the highest is 0.51! They produced a regression model and deduced that because the F-test had a low p value that the dark tetrad scores predicted the car score. The F-test, for clarity, determines if a model predicts the response variable better than a model with no explanatory variables.
Also worth noting that there were stronger correlations between the explanatory variables than for any of the explanatory variables with the response. They should have included interactions in their regression model to incorporate this, or even better tried a set of models and compared them with ANOVA or similar. As is it’s impossible to say if the model they found is actually very good. It only explains 29% of the variance which… Well, it’s a statistic which is better for comparing models, but it suggests quite clearly they most of the variance in the car score is not explained but the dark tetrad scores.
There’s a smattering of evidence in here that there’s some statistical link between the scores, but it’s not been well explored or presented, and there are issues with the statistical approach. Based on some comments in the discussion section I’d agree with your suggestion that the author is simply trying to confirm their hypothesis.
What are you talking about? A correlation coefficient of .5 is in the ballpark of or bigger than the correlation between human height and weight. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bottleneck isn’t in the reliability of the measurement.
Unmodeled interactions here also would only be able to suppress the explained variance - adding them in could only increase the R-squared!
"They produced a regression model and deduced that because the F-test had a low p value that the dark tetrad scores predicted the car score. The F-test, for clarity, determines if a model predicts the response variable better than a model with no explanatory variables. "
Yes, when you wanna know if a variable predicts another, one thing you can do is that you compare how well a model with the predictor included fares compared to a model without the predictor. One way of doing that is by using an F-test.
In case your 101 course hasn’t covered that yet: F-tests are also commonly used when performing an analysis of variance.
“As is it’s impossible to say if the model they found is actually very good.”
You say that after quoting explained variance, which is much more useful (could use confidence intervals… but significance substitutes here a little) in this context for judging how good a model is in absolute terms than some model comparison would be (which could give relative goodness).
Your criticism amounts to “maybe they are understating the evidence”.
Do you think the paper drew sensible conclusions, or do you just not like my arguments?
A correlation coefficient of .5 is in the ballpark of or bigger than the correlation between human height and weight. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bottleneck isn’t in the reliability of the measurement.
This is fair enough, my background is not in social research so to me 0.5 is a moderate correlation. Not sure what you mean by the ‘bottleneck’ here, are you suggesting that the correlations could be higher with a different survey?
Unmodeled interactions here also would only be able to suppress the explained variance - adding them in could only increase the R-squared!
Given that the explanatory variables are in some cases more strongly correlated with each other than the response, do you think the model without interactions is likely to be an appropriate way to analyse the relationship between the response and the explanatory variables? It doesn’t at all make sense to me to do one single regression model and say “The F test says this is a good model, so the explanatory variables explain the response”, especially with a relatively low R^2, and given the fact that there is evidence of multicollinearity presented alongside!
The paper presents the fact that they have done a regression model with a few good significances without any real analysis of if that model is good. We don’t see if the relationships are linear, we don’t see if the model assumptions are met. Just doing a regression is not enough, in my opinion.
In case your 101 course hasn’t covered that yet:
There’s no need to be rude. It’s perfectly acceptable to disagree with me, but you could do it politely.
F-tests are also commonly used when performing an analysis of variance.
Yes, I’m well aware, although I’m not sure what your point is. They haven’t done any analysis of variance.
As is it’s impossible to say if the model they found is actually very good.
You say that after quoting explained variance, which is much more useful (could use confidence intervals… but significance substitutes here a little) in this context for judging how good a model is in absolute terms than some model comparison would be (which could give relative goodness).
My point is that they haven’t made any effort to find a model that best fits the data, they have just taken all the available variables, smacked them into python or R or whatever, and written down the statistics it spits out. There’s no consideration in the paper given to interpreting the statistics, or to confirming their validity.
From the study:
Although the regression weight for age was not significant, the direction was negative, suggesting greater endorsement for the car items for the younger sample.
Not only was p-value for age clearly not significant, the confidence interval for the coefficient was [–.21, .17]… This includes 0 ffs! There’s no evidence here that there is greater endorsement of the car items in younger respondents. Why was age even included in the model in the first place, given that the correlation was near 0?
Like I said - there is some evidence here of an interaction, I’ll concede that in context the correlation isn’t bad for 2 of the dark tetrad items, Wild and Crafty, but the analysis they have used to present this information is not well thought out or presented. Personally I don’t think that a linear regression model is even the right way to analyse the data they have, I especially don’t think this regression model is a good way to analyse the data.
Were we expecting anything good from people whose only contribution to the artistic output of humanity is “HEAR MY CAR FART”?
Psychopathic, you mean
Ugh. I was in a small touristy town with my family last weekend and like 50 bikers in a row drove by the main street in this small town, just blaring their fucking engines for the good 5 minutes it took them all to go past.
And then there were the other motorcyclists who thought the world wanted to hear the music they were listening to.
I started typing everything below and then remembered most people that modify their exhausts want attention and most of these people with loud cars are young. They usually grow out of it.
I used a loud radio in my car to get mine when young. I still like loud music but keep it to myself.
Original reply
I’ve almost always lived in places where there was a mechanical inspection or smog inspection. There were a few times I had to temporarily let my car be loud and I hated it. These times were only when I was waiting on parts or talent.
Some people play the cat-and-mouse game with loud, modified exhausts and fix them when caught. Others like to modify their ECU so the car makes popping noises when decelerating.
Even negative attention will do, or at least complete disregard for the people who have to listen to the exhaust and don’t think “omg that car with the obnoxious exhaust is so cool…”
