A Day of Safety Driving

To do a homework of social psychology, I was a safety driver last Tuesday.

Photo: comlinkgps.com



On that day, I had an opportunity to drive cars for a long time. This was because I took my friend to a driver’s license office in her car in order for her to take the driving test. Usually, my driving tends to pay attention to other cars, I mean I hardly pay attention to own speed meter.  In fact, we need to adjust to traffic, according to the Washington Driver Guide. So, my speeding is usually 5 to 10 mph over the regulation speed. However, as far as I remember, there is no instruction about adjusting to traffic in Japan where I took driver license at first. We have to obey speed signals in Japan. In short, what I want to say is that my belief or true feeling is to keep or obey speed signals, but here every day I followed others’ behavior. My challenge is to keep driving below the regulation speed.

What was my result of the challenge? I almost accomplished my assignment, throughout driving. However, as I said “almost”, what I mean is that we have a dilemma between keeping the regulation speed and following others’ behavior. When I kept driving at the regulation speed, some cars passed my car. Such behavior was pushing my feeling to drive at faster speed. I was fighting between accomplishing my object as a nonconformist and obeying others’ behavior in my mind. At this time, I considered a question of why people drive at 5 to 10 mph over the speed limit. I thought this is a norm. If everybody kept the regulation speed, I would not care about own speed meter or police officers. However, because some people drive faster than the criteria, our feeling like driving over a little bit, such as 5 to 10 mph, encourage, because everybody does so. This power, unanimity, is strong enough with us.

Finally, I will explain about why I was able to reach the task of keeping the speed limit. The reason why I kept my belief is related to two social psychology concepts: compliance and commitment. In the night before the day, I incidentally heard a story from my host mother. The story was that she was given a ticket for speeding in a school zone, and she paid $271. Obviously, it was my motivation to avoid this kind of punishment, and it was compliance for me. Second, my situation of taking my friend to the driver’s license office made me especially aware of safety driving. Also, though the situation would be a kind of conformity, I needed to show her to a model of good driving. Thus, in advance I decided to keep all of the traffic rules in my mind. I think this is a good example of commitment.

Next day, during driving, I totally forgot to keep to the regulation speed, after losing compliance and commitment. How ironic it was. I thought my feeling or brief was changed by American culture. I would be a conformist because I was so comfortable to follow others.