Cars are rewiring our brains to ignore all the bad stuff about driving

> people were asked to agree or disagree with the following statement: “People shouldn’t smoke in highly populated areas where other people have to breathe in the cigarette fumes.” Then they were asked to respond to a parallel statement about driving: “People shouldn’t drive in highly populated areas where other people have to breathe in the car fumes.”

> While three-fourths of respondents agreed with the first statement (“People shouldn’t smoke...”), only 17 percent agreed with the second (“People shouldn’t drive...”).

The weasel trick they pulled here is that they know people won't assume the smoking question is about wide-open outdoor areas, but that they will assume the driving question is.

> Another statement addressed values around theft of personal property. Respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement, “If somebody leaves their belongings in the street and they get stolen, it’s their own fault for leaving them there and the police shouldn’t be expected to act,” as well as the parallel statement, “If somebody leaves their car in the street and it gets stolen, it’s their own fault for leaving it there and the police shouldn’t be expected to act.”

> Only 8 percent of people disagreed with the first statement, while 55 percent of people disagreed with the second one.

Another weasel trick: they want the reader to infer that the belongings in the first question were carelessly left unsecured, but that the car in the second question was properly secured.

"One of the things you notice if you spend your career trying to get people to drive less"

Set, setting, context, this guy is not grounded. He is a self admitted ideolog.

The questions posed and the answers give more insight into this guys biases than anything else.

For example, he posits, though doesn't clearly say, that smoking and driving are equally dangerous or at least should be considered equally bad. The respondents set him straight, that no, car exhausts killing people is not the same as second hand smoke killing people.

Being the ideolog that he is, he takes that as a defect of the respondents, not his worldview. He then proceeds to tar and feather people for personal and professional prestige by taking his personal fault as a rabbid environmentalist and projecting it onto the 2300 respondents, slandering their "cultural inability to think objectively and dispassionately"

A summary from the article:

> A new study reveals how unconscious bias leads us to neglect negative externalities of driving. You may call it ‘car brain,’ but this research team calls it ‘motornormativity.’