I heard a snippet of a story this morning that I just have to share. Forgive me.
A study out of West Virginia has concluded that Nascar causes car wrecks.
That’s the nugget version. It’s a bit more nuanced than that, but not a whole lot as far as I can tell.
I heard this on NPR, Todd’s media of choice and one that actually seems to pay a fair amount of attention to Nascar. Here’s a link and some key parts. We begin with the reporter who is being interviewed and then he cuts to a quote from the researcher:
SHANKAR VEDANTAM: So this is work done by a psychologist called Guy Vitaglione. He’s at the West Virginia University Institute of Technology, and he looked at all the traffic accidents that took place in West Virginia over a four year period, and then he tried to find the kinds of accidents that mimic what happened on a race track, where there are multiple cars or where the police officer on the scene lists the cause of the accident as aggressive driving.
And he finds that five days after major NASCAR races, there is a spike in traffic accidents. And he did a whole bunch of controls to make sure he was being as conservative as possible, and over a four year period he’s found 650 extra accidents on West Virginia roads that he believes are caused by people essentially acting out NASCAR in their own driving.
DR. GUY VITAGLIONE: There is the conscious awareness that I’m watching a NASCAR race, I’m not actually in a NASCAR race, and tomorrow when I drive to work I’m still not in a NASCAR race. But that understanding does not take away from the impact that mass media exposure is going to have on the way you think and the way you feel and what you actually do.
Yes, you’re seeing some blame going to the media. But we’ve already blamed the media for everything, so it’s more fun to turn the lens on Nascar. Now, here’s the weird thing. The spike in accidents happens on the fifth day after, not the first or second or sixth. More on that:
VEDANTAM: You know, so this is a big question. He actually doesn’t know the answer to that question. I mean, one possibility is that NASCAR races typically are run on Friday, Saturday, and Sundays, and five days after the NASCAR race, you know, you’re heading into the next weekend. Maybe it’s a Friday. Maybe people…
GREENE: More people are on the road going on vacation for the weekend…
VEDANTAM: Possibly. I mean the short answer is we don’t know. There’s speculation, but we don’t really know why it’s five days.
You’re probably thinking: Well, this is just 18-year-old guys driving too fast. They don’t actually have that much profile. So it’s impossible to say.
Why does this happen? Well, here’s the speculative answer:
VEDANTAM: You know, this effect is likely happening because people aren’t realizing what they’re doing. They aren’t realizing that they are unconsciously internalizing what they see on NASCAR on television to their own driving behavior, and so doing what you and I are doing right now, which is making this unconscious process conscious, may itself have a salutary effect.
I wonder what the effects are from a Formula 1 race? And what is it if you control for Paul Charsley?