SoylentNews

Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

It's an ancient article [maths.org], but still relevant to, and perhaps of interest for, Soylentils stuck in holiday traffic...

When driving on the motorway, have you ever wondered about (and cursed) the fact that cars in the other lane seem to be getting ahead faster than you? You might be inclined to account for this by invoking Murphy's Law ("If anything can go wrong, it will", discovered by Edward A. Murphy, Jr, in 1949). However, a recent paper [nature.com] in Nature [nature.com] by Redelmeier and Tibshirani seeks a deeper explanation.

According to the authors, drivers suffer from systematic illusions causing them to mistakenly think they would have been better off in the next lane. In this Plus article, we show that their argument fails to take into account an important observation selection effect - namely that cars in the next lane actually do go faster!

In their paper, Redelmeier and Tibshirani present some evidence that drivers on Canadian roadways think that the next lane is typically faster. (You can read their paper [brandeis.edu] for more about this). They seek to explain the drivers' perceptions by appealing to a variety of psychological factors. For example:

        --"A driver is more likely to glance at the next lane for comparison when he is relatively idle while moving slowly";

        --"Differential surveillance can occur because drivers look forwards rather than backwards, so vehicles that are overtaken become invisible very quickly, whereas vehicles that overtake the index driver remain conspicuous for much longer"; and

        --"Human psychology may make being overtaken (losing) seem more salient than the corresponding gains."

Original Submission