A desire for a loud car correlates with higher scores on psychopathy and sadism | Hacker News Reader

A desire for a loud car correlates with higher scores on psychopathy and sadism

cipp.ug.edu.pl

123 pointsdoener79 comments

I'm not a car guy, so I used to think such ear-damaging decibels were necessary for performance but have since learned it's not required even for ultra-high performance road cars that can go >200 mph. While a 12 cylinder Lamborghini Aventador is louder than a Hyundai, when both are idling at a stop light, it's actually barely louder from 100 feet away. And yet people with real supercars almost never modify them to be louder than stock.

My wife is a serious car girl and drives her beloved McLaren well enough to be in the top five on amateur days at Sonoma Raceway. She's taught me that different supercars each have their own signature sound and to her it'd be sacrilegious to mess with such iconic perfection. :-)

She's in a club of other supercar owners that puts on a huge charity car show where members bring over $100M of exotics - and none of those cars are nearly as loud as the sonic assault from one of the hopped up $10k rust buckets that occasionally pulls up next to my wife at a stop light and makes our ears bleed revving their engine. They always want to race "the cute girl in the McLaren" but she never takes the bait. When I asked why, she just scoffed that they're all bark and no bite. Plus she has no idea if the driver is race-trained, if their rust-bucket is even safe to be near at high-speeds or if they have insurance. Her favorite line about engine noise is from when she was picking up her car at the McLaren factory in England. While track-testing it with one of the race engineers, he joked "as engineers, we see excess noise as embarrassing because it's wasted horsepower we failed to transfer to the axle."

The only thing I can really think of is a turbo Anti Lag System that you can get in top-end consumer cars like Mercedes AMGs. It’s that popping you hear when coming off the throttle, you’ll also hear it in rally cars. The funny thing is, the same popping can happen with any car if the timing is off so you sometimes get kids driving around with misfiring engines cause it “sounds cool” even though their car might not even have a turbo fan! It’s one of those things that if they were actually passionate about these machines they’d know they look like idiots, but they’re not so they do.

The popping sounds from a turbo car is from the wastegate (whistling sound for a blow off value) when the system is releasing pressure from the turbo that was built up. It prevents over compression that would damage the engine.

I’m not talking about a dump valve, I’m talking about an ALS as I’ve mentioned. This is where the engine timing is delayed which results in some combustion to happen in the exhaust (hence literal pops). This is used to keep the turbo spooled by MAINTAINING pressure across the system. It’s a performance system.

If your dump valve is popping I think there’s something wrong!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antilag_system

> And yet people with real supercars almost never modify them to be louder than stock.

people with real supercars don't have anything to prove, nor any reason to want more attention.

if anything, they want less attention. esp. from the random pleb on the road. the existence of the car itself is enough.

and that's before the muscle car sound purist that the parent poster alludes to.

This is a weird take. Has anyone here been to Miami or LA?

I’ve known a lot of people with supercars. Quite a few want the attention. If they didn’t - they would drive a different car. Very few are getting them for performance reasons. If they just wanted a performance car then they’d probably just get an open wheel.

When I first moved to LA, I remember thinking that it was so strange for all these people to have these really high end cars with like 700 HP in them, all to sit in traffic all day long. Like, why bother?

Then I sat in LA traffic all day long in early September in 100+ heat, and I looked over and saw some old bitty in a very nice Bentley. Not a drop of sweat on her, couldn't hear a horn honking if she tried, music was probably perfect quality, seat was probably massaging her the whole ride home.

That's when I finally got it. It's not the engine that mattered to her.

> It's not the engine that mattered to her.

People into ultra-luxury car brands have a saying something like "The person who pulls up to a five star hotel in a Rolls Royce has a huge suite but the person who pulls up in a Bentley owns the hotel." :-)

> Quite a few want the attention.

Through the supercar club my wife belongs to we've now met dozens of supercar owners and from that sample I'd say it's roughly a Pareto split. For about 20% the status signaling and attention is the major feature while the other ~80% own the car for the driving performance and enjoy the look aesthetically but would prefer if it looked like a minivan to everyone else. There's also a practical consideration because a few people drive like idiots around supercars. I've been with my wife on the highway and had cars race up and start weaving dangerously in the lane next to us because the driver was shooting video of our car.

The ~20% focused on status do sort of cluster around a type. The signaling extends to clothes, jewelry, etc being overtly blingy. As a group they're more likely to do things like peel out at stop lights and drive faster than the flow of traffic. The car they own also tends to be at the bottom of the supercar range, something like a Huracan, which is technically a Lamborghini but internally based on an Audi R8. It's a nice car but my wife says (privately to me)... "Dude, just get the Audi version. Same car. Less money and the service is better."

In general, my sense is the majority of the club are passionate car enthusiasts who feel the 'status' guys (it's always guys) give supercar owners a bad rep and just roll their eyes at the attention-seeking behavior. One time when a car meet was ending, we were talking with a knowledgeable older gentleman from England. We discovered he'd been a super-licensed race driver in F3 a couple decades ago and as he was explaining the finer points of wheel-loading in low-speed corners to my wife, one of 'those guys' in a Huracan loudly peeled out of the parking lot. As the smoke was clearing, the gentleman glanced over and sniffed "The machine was engineered to accelerate without losing traction but one does need to possess a modicum of skill." :-)

You’re also in a particular club. I’ve met a lot of supercar owners just in the wild and at my work. A lot of them are into it for the status. Some can be passionate but very few will ever drive them that hard.

My 80/20 was a broad simplification of a more nuanced landscape but I do think there's a real split, so I'll try to add one-click greater detail. While most people make any major purchase for multiple reasons, for the ~20% the status signaling seems to be the single most important factor. And it's not limited to their car choice. They're pretty aggressive in outwardly signaling status to everyone, including random strangers they don't know.

For the other ~80%, the primary motivation varies but it's not status (though that can be a secondary contributor for some). I'd estimate roughly half are car enthusiasts, split between those focused on driving performance and collectors who tend to own several supercars, sometimes rare limited editions. For those folks, projecting status can't be primary because at the race track everyone has a very expensive car and collectors can only drive one supercar at a time - so why bother with the hassle of garaging a collection no one ever sees?

I'm not sure exactly how to describe the other half but they aren't mainly car enthusiasts. I'd describe it more as being quality enthusiasts who appreciate having things which they personally feel are of uniquely high quality. Those things are usually expensive but they don't trust price as a reliable indication of 'unique quality' and they don't bother 'projecting' anything to others because they don't seem to care what others think.

For them It's about specific traits they find uniquely valuable - and it's not always things other people recognize as valuable. One McLaren owner give me a detailed exposition on how its unique one-piece carbon fiber monocoque delivers best-in-class torsional rigidity enabling incredibly precise tracking on low-speed corners. He said he enjoys it immensely as "an engineering object" yet he's never driven it over 85 mph and wouldn't know how to change the oil. Then he educated me about how his shirt was also an example of unusual quality, performance micro-materials and clever design. I asked him where I could get one and learned it's $20 at Costco. So, pretty clearly not focused on status projection. A lot of these folks are kind of 'stealth supercar owners'. A couple years after my wife got her McLaren, her sister visited from out of state and was shocked to be picked up in a McLaren at the airport. My wife had never mentioned it because she said her sister "isn't a car person." But the ~20% apparently manage to do more than enough signaling for the rest of us. I'm sure everyone they've ever met knows what car they have. :-)

There is a medical treatise, "On Assholes", just waiting to be written here, in much the same way that Harry G. Frankfurt introduced us to the technical academic concept of 'bullshit' in his book "On Bullshit".

Not medical, but there is a book: https://www.onassholes.com/

While looking for that in the local libraries I saw there's an update? variant? "Assholes: A theory of Donald Trump". Looks to be mostly the same book, just with Trump's face added to the cover. There's also quite a lot of other books about dealing with assholes. "I knew it! I'm surrounded by (books about) assholes!".

Participants were 529 undergraduate business students with a mean age of 18.14 years

I find this participant set pointless.

Most kids who were with me in college dreamt of owning muscle cars and Harleys.

Fast forward 25 years: The same set, now in their 40s, get elevated blood pressure at the mere thought of having to share the road with a lifted truck.

At 20, while in the Marine Corps, I absolutely had to have a lifted orange Jeep.

decades later, it is cringe, and after a friend of a friend was killed by an idiot in a RAM truck, I'm 100% in favor of banning the "yank tank" style trucks

youts gonna yout

Participants were 529 (289 men, 234 women, and 6 identified as other) undergraduate business students with a mean age of 18.14 years (SD = 1.19, range 16 to 37).

Sigh. A sample of convenience. Psychology remains the study of undergraduates.

If they wanted real answers, they'd go to bike events.

I’ve noticed in my own car’s forums that over about ten years, most of the loud-seekers moved on to other cars while the remainder of us have much more diversity of gender and ‘loudness’ interests. Our sample size of self-nominated participants is also a couple thousand, not at all restricted to undergrads, and anecdotally parallels the study: those who seek loudness uniformly present as men, and in large majority tend to treat prosocial-community responses with disregard, hostility, or mockery. So, this study tracks :) but that doesn’t excuse the sampling bias of business-degrees (a field of graduates which includes corporate executives and daytraders, neither particularly well known for their social concerns), nor the self-selecting and anecdotal nature of my own separate experience. Perhaps we’ll see a wider study someday.

> those who seek loudness uniformly present as men, and in large majority tend to treat prosocial-community responses with disregard, hostility, or mockery.

Is the loudness then just a big "fuck you" to the rest of the world or does it provide the loudness seeker with something besides the joy of knowing that they're pissing off everyone within earshot? If they were the last living person on Earth would they still go to the trouble to modify their vehicle for loudness?

I wonder too. Maybe it could be plumage to seek attention, maybe asserting "superiority", maybe dominating. security/insecurity?

I do know sometimes when someone pulls up nearby with loud music coming out of their rolled-down windows... I wonder what putting on loud disney princess music would do?

It's a pretty basic dopamine response, do something, hear something big happen, feel good. Real basic and, fairly universal. You may prefer a quieter car, but there is also a sound level that is below your preference. Your preference just happens to be different. You may prefer some other form of this concept. Maybe you like loud music. Maybe you like loud colors. Loud flavors. Maybe all of the above. That's fine, that's called a preference.

The hostility comes from the perception that someone wants to take away your toy. Again, it's very very basic, the same thing you see if you try to take away an item from an animal that is engaged in a dopamine response with that item. Like a dog eating something. They will bite you or at least growl if you take it away.

> The hostility comes from the perception that someone wants to take away your toy. Again, it's very very basic, the same thing you see if you try to take away an item from an animal that is engaged in a dopamine response with that item. Like a dog eating something. They will bite you or at least growl if you take it away.

Sure, but now replace “toy” with, “peaceful Neighbourhood”

The only reason anyone wants to take someone’s dumb truck away is because they made the the first move, destroying or significantly degrading something that other people enjoyed.

Yes exactly! Replace toy with peaceful neighborhood. From each other's perspective, you both appear to have the same goals. How would you solve that without taking away someone else's peaceful neighborhood?

I would say that if you want to drive loud fast cars, you’re welcome to do so, on a track intended for that purpose. Conversely, if you want to drive on public roads near children and where people live then you have to drive slow and quiet.

  Real basic and, fairly universal. You may prefer a quieter car, but there is also a sound level that is below your preference.

I do not believe this to be true. My feeling is: some people (or rather: some people in some occasions) enjoy to be noticed, and some others enjoy not to be noticed.

Stealth mode might be occasionally useful, but personally, I want my car to be just loud enough that I can tell when it's running. I've used cars where I couldn't always tell and it sometimes resulted in stupid mistakes like leaving them running when I didn't mean to, or trying to start a car that was already running. It can also be helpful for people outside of the car to be able to hear when a car is approaching. I've never wanted a car to be louder than necessary for those reasons though and whatever noise it makes it shouldn't be annoying or intrusive.

"Personally, I want my CPU to be just warm enough that I can tell its working. We should outlaw overclocking because of [insert some way that it bothers somebody]"

This is just culture war for HN commenters. Everyone should grow up a little more.

You're interpreting this completely differently; I was referring to the idea of big feedback being a driving factor in any human action. Feedback doesn't have to come from another person noticing you. It can be as simple as, I did this, its very loud, that feels very good.

I like loud music, but I have headphones and don't try to impose it on everybody else. There are probably tons of antisocial activities that promote a dopamine reponse, but most of us know better.

> but there is also a sound level that is below your preference.

I would be thrilled with a silent car if it was safe and legal.

My hearing is +20-30dB oversensitive, so for me it’s all just pain and suffering, which is why I live on a 25mph road rather than a 55mph road. What I’ve discovered is that there are two subsets of loud drivers: ones that are loud every time, and ones that are loud only when they’ve left the residential area. Harley drivers are a good example of this split, as they tend not to gas their engines loudly around residential zones.

Dogs that tend to bite when denied their pleasures tend not to be welcome in prosocial human societies. One wishes drivers were more often held to the same standard.

Same reason someone would wear bright red shoes or a loud outfit, I guess. Maybe to you it’s annoying, but maybe to them it’s cool, loud, and fun. Seems easy enough to understand, even if it’s a little antisocial. Same reason punks do punk stuff, kinda, could be one way to look at it.

That's a category error.

One is a presentation and the other is noise pollution negatively impacting everyone else and the environment.

the difference is that I can't hear your bright red outfit from 3 blocks away

*1 mile, here

I think it's a mix across the different kinds of people.

For me my car isn't loud right now, but I do just genuinely enjoy the thrill and sound of the car in "track" setup. It's too loud to drive on the street but it's a thrill on track. The loudness isn't the point and I wish it were quieter, but the different exhaust components give it the raw visceral sound that I love.

I guess you can think of it like the difference between music on the TV or music at a concert, the sound is literally different not just louder, and the context makes everything more visceral.

I think it’s worth pointing out that there’s a subset of people who have loud exhausts because the engine actually needs it. They’ve supped it up to an insane spec for performance reasons. You can’t have 500+ horsepower try to breathe through a straw. There are sports cars that are loud from the factory because of this.

Now is it smart to do all of that just to drive 35mph in traffic? That’s another discussion :)

Somewhat second this: high flow exhausts that are also appropriately catted & muffled will lose a few horsepower compared to an equivalent exhaust that is not. Laguna Seca and Sonoma iirc and other raceways ended up putting into place strict decibel limits, but I believe the only city applying serious decibel enforcement for retail street cars right now is NYC (where flooring a Porsche can actually break the noise laws, as Porsche sells cars from factory that way). You certainly can make the straw Even Bigger to compensate but generally both drivers and manufacturers tend to take the cheaper-louder or maxxer-louder paths if vehicle horsepower is their primary concern, unless externally pressured otherwise.

Happened for my car community too, anecdotal of course.

Two aspects I think, the clout chasers move on, and the remaining cohort are older with a bit more empathy for community and also better things to do than provoke the cops. No speaking for everyone with that last bit, there are still those that thrive on the chaos.

There's also tech to solve for having your cake and eating it too. Get a valve, loud for track days, quiet for the commute.

Self-reported data via an internet survey. Garbage science means garbage data. I wouldn't put any faith in these results. You can't swing a dead cat in a room full of business students without hitting a bunch of sadistic psychopaths anyway.

> If they wanted real answers, they'd go to bike events.

They‘d meet a bunch of 1) people actively being assholes and/or 2) people with a lack of basic empathy.

As a biker, there is sure a lot of peer pressure to have a louder bike. My s1k has the factory msport straight through akro muffler and a valve system that opens the larger exit, also bypassing the baffles in the 'lunchbox' underneath, at 7k. Meaning it's very quiet until it's being asked to go very fast.

Replacing the cats and lunchbox with headers gives under 1hp on a 220hp bike.

But, every meetup, multiple people are asking "when are you getting a proper exhaust system". Which is basically louder for no other reason but being loud.

I guess this explains why in Japan very few of the motorcycles are loud. It's something I was surprised by when moving here from the US. It seems like in the US most (or perhaps many more) riders are being deliberately antisocial?

A lot of the sports bikes I see around my area are operated by 18 year olds. Who at 18 in this country are being perfectly upstanding members of society? There’s always some stupidity in that phase of life. I wouldn’t put too much thought into it.

It's entirely possible to be mischievous or a prankster without being an asshole.

Yeah, but a lot of the loudest are grey-haired men reclined on Harleys, alternating idling and revving in the middle of residential neighborhoods at all hours of day and night.

As covered in SouthPark 'documentary' noted above. Worth a watch.

> As a biker, there is sure a lot of peer pressure to have a louder bike.

I'm amused by vehicles which are very noisy when barely doing anything. Really, almost all cars today have more acceleration than can be used outside racing. Most SUVs and pickup trucks today have better 0-60 times than 1960s muscle cars.

In normal operation today, the power train is not working very hard. Many pickup trucks now have fake engine noise in the cabin generated by the audio system. Not just electrics; gas engine vehicles too. Ford has been doing this since 2015, and most customers do not know it.

I’m a classic car owner, I get the same thing from some people in that scene. I have kept my car exhaust at stock specs and it’s just the right level of loud for what the car is. IMO the cars should be as loud as how powerful they are. You can’t have a 455+ ci engine and expect it to be quiet, and the smaller the exhaust the harder it is for the engine to breathe. It’s a balance that has to be done right.

Thank you. As a biker I really dislike bikes made lout just to be made loud.

No, it doesn't save lives, most serious accidents are being t-boned on the junction, the car failing to yield to the biker with priority, biker losing control over the machine, or biker being reckless.

Most of it (at least in the UK) is attributed to ineffective observation, which in case of the bikers means education (training) and better visibility (special lights, bright coloured jacket and helmet).

Not a deafening ride.

South Park did a pretty great episode on this topic. IIRC, they had Emmanuel Lewis “officially” change the definition of a word in Websters’ Dictionary!

Those questions don't allow for the possibility of installing louder exhausts for non-psychoanalyzable reasons... There are also degrees of loudness.

I put a slightly louder exhaust on my turbo car because the large torque jump at around 2000 rpm is/was harder to anticipate with the standard exhaust and cabin sound dampening at speed. Now the engine note is a better indicator of the impending torque jump and makes driving smoother and easier without taking my eyes off the road and onto the tachometer.

Have a look at every owner of excessively loud pickem up trucks and motorcycles too.

I would like to find a lighter exhaust system for my motorcycle, the stock system weighs like 30 pounds. All the aftermarket exhausts seem to be louder then stock. I want something that light and quiet but everyone else seems to want loud AF.

Add a muffler. Universal ones exist and a shop can fabricate the exhaust headers/tubing to make it work.

South Park did it.

My friends and I always assumed it correlates with a small penis.

It is true for gun ownership, so I guess it is true for noise.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11143840/

Oh how conveniently this would fit into your worldview ;)

If you had read the actual study, you would have noticed this paragraph:

the odds of owning a gun (any gun or a military-style rifle) are lower for men who are more dissatisfied with the size of their penises. In fact, each one-unit increase in penis size dissatisfaction reduces the odds of owning any gun by 11% (OR = 0.89, p < .05) and the odds of owning a military-style rifle by 20% (OR = .80, p < .01). According to Model 2 of Table 5, each one-unit increase in penis size dissatisfaction also reduces the expected count of total guns owned by 11% (IRR = 0.89, p < .01). Across outcomes, we failed to observe any associations between penis enlargement and gun ownership.

Oh, thanks for the correction. I misread the abstract indeed.

This probably won't surprise you, but most of the time, the only variable psychologists measure during initial patient assessment is penis size, because it explains nearly every male behavior there is.

now this ^ is the high quality HN discussion that we come here for

Sadistic psychopathic MAGA assholes love rolling coal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal

>Some incidents have led to injuries. In 2021, six bicyclists training for a road race were run over by a 16-year-old who was rolling coal along Business U.S. Highway 290 in Waller County, Texas, outside Houston, when he attempted to drive ahead of the group to engulf them in the exhaust. Two of the cyclists were injured severely enough to require medical evacuation by helicopter. The motorist was not charged at the time of the collision; local cyclists' groups were outraged. [13] He was later charged with six felony counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. [14]

[13] A teenager allegedly hit 6 bicyclists with his truck, sending 3 to the hospital. A biker says the driver was harassing them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/09/30/texas-teen-...

[14] Waller DA files 6 felonies for 'rolling coal' crash that injured 6 cyclists https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/transpor...

MAGA supporter who coal rolled (black truck smoke) onto protesters outs himself (Parker, Co)

https://www.reddit.com/r/parkerco/comments/1qbdx8a/maga_supp...

Coal rolled at the 'No Kings' protest

https://thewesternnews.com/news/2025/jun/17/coal-rolled-at-t...

The Cruel Practice of Rolling Coal

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-red-light-distri...

2023

Actual title: A desire for a loud car with a modified muffler is predicted by being a man and higher scores on psychopathy and sadism

Past: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ug.edu.pl

Can we put motorcycle owners in the same bracket?

All of them? LOL.

These with stupidly loud bikes? Sure.

Correlation doesn't imply causation

https://xkcd.com/552/

> Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.

fascinating:

Crafty – Machiavellianism

Special – narcissism

Wild – psychopathy

Mean – sadism

I don't like the association of the word crafty with Machiavelli. "Crafty" is basically synonymous with hacker. You can be crafty without being a dick.

Also mid life crisis.

the study was on business undergrads, which means likely 18-24

at no point does the study mention mid-life or anyone outside of the college cohort.

> undergraduate business students with a mean age of 18.14 years (SD = 1.19, range 16 to 37).

Quarter life crisis then.

I don’t like loud exhausts but I’m also not threatened by masculinity.

I wonder if this correlates with people who blow whistles or play loud musical instruments at protests.

Looks like this guy never seen rainbow bluetooth speakers at tourist spots.

I don't think the average owner of a loud vehicle is trying to disorient others in hopes of getting them to make a mistake like mag dumping on someone trying to drive away.

Manliness is the confounding factor.

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