Road sharing - does it matter what road users think of each other?

What is a moral model?17Nevertheless, there are interesting questions to explore here. There is goodreason to believe that our sense of what people should do is shaped by ourobservation of what people do in fact do (a point to which we will returnlater); even if our moral expectations do not directly influence our predictiveexpectations, they may share a common cause with them. Like stereotypes,moral evaluations may also have an impact on emotions, with unknown furtherconsequences on the road.Saints, villains and victimsA moral model, we have suggested, comprises two parts:• The first links types of people to psychological characteristics which can beinvoked in the explanation of their behaviour.• The second links types of road user to rules, responsibilities, rights andlegitimate claims, in the context of different types of place.There is no reason to suppose that these two typologies coincide perfectly: infact there are good reasons to suppose they will not. Car driver stereotypes,for instance, may be influenced by factors such as the make of car, but it ishard to imagine someone other than Jeremy Clarkson arguing that the driversof some makes of car have different rights or responsibilities as a result. Othertypes, such as a hybrid car driver, may cut across both typologies for somepeople but not for others.Nevertheless, the two typologies clearly intersect, and in their intersection liesthe potential for a range of saints, villains and victims.Consider an obvious example: the white van man. Back in 1999, in responseto research commissioned by Renault UK which sought to expose this‘gross caricature of reality’, the BBC helpfully decided to find some driverswho demurred:One driver told the BBC (1999): ‘They come right up behind youfrom behind and flash at you if you don’t move out of the way.’Another said: ‘They tend to be on the whole chauvinist pigs thatdon’t look out for cars and pull out at every opportunity.’Caricatures such as these describe attributed psychological characteristics ofthe road users being described and the behaviour that is seen from them in thecontexts of actual responsibilities and rights. They sit across the two halves ofthe moral model.