Social psychologist Guy Vitaglione listened as students commented on the aggressive drivers they encountered on their way back from a NASCAR race.


He got to thinking: Did the race cause the bad driving? He began to form a hypothesis: Does mass media create bad behavior?

He pulled crash data for every day from 2004 to 2008 in West Virginia, where he was a professor.

He plotted every Winston Cup race, every police crash report listing aggressive driving, and state Department of Transportation information on road conditions, weather and visibility.

His discovery: The number of crashes attributed to aggressive driving spiked five days after a race.

So, what does this mean?

"It's not a simple finding," Vitaglione said of the research, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in July 2011. "It's kind of complicated."

It also leads to questions like: Why were the effects detected five days later and not immediately after? Did he ask the drivers if they had watched the race? Why NASCAR?

"My goal was to link a mass media event to driving," said Vitaglione, formerly at West Virginia University Institute of Technology.

"I thought that West Virginia would be a perfect place to conduct the study" not only because that's where he was a professor, but also because the state has the highest number of NASCAR fans per capita, minus any NASCAR tracks.

Vitaglione said he relied on a combination of 156 televised NASCAR events and almost 29,000 crashes, plus weather patterns. He was able to control for predictable patterns, such as holidays and vacations, when fewer people are on the road.

Each individual police report was coded with control data supplied by the attending officer.

On the day of a televised race, there was a reliable decline in crashes, even when controlling for the other factors. Vitaglione said this would make sense, based on more people staying home to watch the race and based on the fact that races are on the weekend, the days with typically fewer drivers on the road.

What his data doesn't support was the premise that road incidents should spike directly after a race. After all, the theory goes, fans would be full of adrenaline and emotion immediately following a race and then get in a crash. Or they would still be in a heightened state the next morning (Monday) on the way to work.

Actually, there were 23.59 crashes on the Fridays following the race vs. 19.40 accidents for other days.

And that was his second discovery: All this data for aggressive driving spiked five days after a race. He used the police classification for aggressive driving: sideswipes, failure to yield, among others.

So why five days later? Vitaglione says the reasons aren't clear.

"What we find is that people have a delay in action after a highly publicized media event," he said.

He cited studies done in the 1960s and 1970s, when boxing was commonplace on TV, which found a spike in homicide rates three days after a bout. Delay in action is also why police worry about copycat crimes.

"Sociologists have puzzled on this delayed effect," he said. "There are no definitive answers."

Paul Jovanis, an expert on crash data analysis, noted that homicides are "deliberate acts, while crashes are well known to be unintentional."

"I am an engineer, not a psychologist, but this difference would concern me when seeking to draw the analogy," said Jovanis, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Transportation Operations Program at the Larson Institute at Penn State.

Vitaglione said that while a homicide can be classified as intentional, so can aggressive driving, since the driver is aware of his actions and continues the behavior.

But Jovanis questioned the umbrella terms for weather such as "rain" in the study.

"What does 'rain' mean on a statewide basis?" he asked. "Similarly for 'poor road conditions.' While West Virginia is a small state, it surely was not raining everywhere the same on each day."

He suggested using weather-reporting stations for specific data across the state instead of police officers' perceptions in the reports as the control data.

Vitaglione did not loop back with the drivers to see if they had watched a race. He also has no explanation why five days later was the magic number. He said it was "tough to pin it on a reason."

He hypothesized that drivers may have hit their breaking point after several days of dealing with bad drivers. Or, perhaps race memories affected them days later. Or maybe social cues were involved, such as the carpool talking about the race.

Vitaglione said he doesn't plan to expand the research to other locations that either have a track or a huge fan base.

"The study wasn't really about NASCAR," Vitaglione maintained. "It was about mass media's influence. I was interested in everyday behavior. Everyone drives."