Robert Mann hates car horns. “It always seems that I’m at a traffic light and there’s a person behind me who,as soon as the light turns
green,is on the horn. I find that incredibly irritating.”
Mann, an associate professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences and senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, has made a career of studying bad drivers, and in the past few years has turned his attention to road rage.
“Road rage means directing aggression at other drivers,” he says, “and that can range from relatively mild forms like shaking your fist, to causing injury to other drivers or damaging their cars.”
In a series of papers with a variety of collaborators over the last half-dozen years, Mann has studied the prevalence of road rage, its treatment in the media, its relationship
to serious car accidents and strategies for preventing it.
When he began looking at the phenomenon in the late 1990s it was relatively
new. “One of the major questions then was whether road rage was an urban myth,
something the press was playing up. A big focus of our research has been to see if
there is something real out there that affects us as drivers and affects road safety
statistics. Our conclusion so far is that there definitely is.”
Mann and his colleagues Reg Smart and Gina Stoduto have shown that road rage is
experienced by almost half the population in Ontario. Between a third and a quarter of
people admit to being perpetrators and 10 per cent of the population has been involved
in incidents serious enough to warrant criminal charges.
“What we are beginning to see is that there is an interactive process involved. It often
begins with a very minor incident that involves an escalating interchange between
drivers. Those are the incidents you read about in the paper.”
All this constitutes a serious public health problem, says Mann, because road rage is
an important contributor to collision and injury on the road. As such, he believes that
part of the solution is better public education.
“There seems to be a willingness to do things in your vehicle that you would not
do under other circumstances. If you’re in a meeting at work, you wouldn’t make a
rude gesture. Why would you treat driving as any different than being in a meeting
in a workplace?”
Together with collaborators, Mann has also examined whether car design can
help prevent road rage. Sensors could be installed in vehicles that warn a driver
who is tailgating the car ahead. Repeat offenders could be monitored by technology
that would govern their speed (analogous to drivers who must pass a breathalyzer
test before starting their engines). Circuits could be installed to prevent
repeated horn blowing.
The researchers have even considered ways to help drivers communicate with each
other better. “We have brake lights,” says Mann. “Why not thank you lights?”
If you're a fan of the 1990s comedy series Seinfeld, you’re probably
familiar with the characters’ brandishing of brand-name
snack foods on the show. But do you remember what brand
of laundry detergent Jerry kept on his shelf? How about the
grape juice that George sipped while whining to his pals?
Sharmistha Law, associate professor of Marketing at U of T Scarborough and the
Rotman School of Management investigates the effect of product placement on
consumer behaviour. “In our cluttered environment, people can zap in and out of
traditional advertising. They can ignore and even erase ads completely from the
programs they choose to watch,” she says. “So for a marketer it is harder to grab
people’s attention. The alternative is to use media such as the television program
itself as a venue to pitch their products.” Law, in fact, took the Seinfeld example to test
whether product placement really has an impact on consumers and if so, what kind?
She tested two groups with separate clips of the show, one portraying Tide detergent
on the shelf and the other with Welch’s grape juice in the shot. Law explains that participants
did not know what, about the show, they were being asked. Later,when they were
asked to make a shopping list and choose from specific brands, they selected brandname
items that were placed in the Seinfeld clips more often than another group that
did not watch the clips. Law explains: “There was definitely facilitation on the choice
measure, meaning that product placement did have an effect. We also measured their
product recognition, so we asked them to think back to the episode,and tell us what
brands were placed. People had a great deal of memory for that as well.”
One limitation of the Seinfeld study, she points out, is that consumers may be more
likely to choose a product because they like the celebrity involved. In order to get around
this, Law developed two videos with different products using UTSC drama students.
“Using various products, we found the same effect as in the Seinfeld experience,”
she says. Law is currently extending that research into comparisons between product
placement and regular advertising and effects on consumer choice.
Initial data show
that although recognition and recall measures are higher for regular
advertising, the product placement has a stronger effect on the choices.
Is product placement morally wrong? Law says that initially product placement was
done to lend authenticity to characters in movies — we couldn’t imagine movies being
taken seriously if characters are using fictitious brands — but now the trend has reached
a point where the marketers must use ad agencies to get that exposure. At some point,
Law says, it’s an opportunity for marketers to catch consumers when they have their
guards down: “We may want to know what could be done to protect consumers from this
interference with their enjoyment of an art form or entertainment.”