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This Is What it Means if Slow Walkers Make You Furious - Tonic Vice
Researchers are starting to take pedestrian aggression more seriously.
Chances are you have felt it at least once in your life, if not every damned day: the bubbling rage working through your veins, filling your soul, consuming your being, as you find yourself trapped behind a slow walker. Whether targeting people for moseying on a busy walkway while using their phones, groups for spreading out and forming plodding barricades, or tourists for being, well, tourists, screeds against slow walkers are a dime a dozen online.
This anger is so common it actually has an academic designation: sidewalk rage. Leon James, a University of Hawaii psychologist and leading expert on the phenomenon, likens it to road rage. While we often talk about sidewalk rage as an internal irk, or “private mental venting that consists of irrational assumptions regarding other pedestrians,” the feelings can escalate through fantasies of “violent acts against the inconsiderate sidewalk blockers” in some to “the overt expression of hostility and aggressiveness," James notes. Yet for all most of us know about sidewalk rage, few understand where it comes from, or why some feel it more acutely—at times or always—than others.
Researchers are starting to take pedestrian aggression more seriously.
Chances are you have felt it at least once in your life, if not every damned day: the bubbling rage working through your veins, filling your soul, consuming your being, as you find yourself trapped behind a slow walker. Whether targeting people for moseying on a busy walkway while using their phones, groups for spreading out and forming plodding barricades, or tourists for being, well, tourists, screeds against slow walkers are a dime a dozen online.
This anger is so common it actually has an academic designation: sidewalk rage. Leon James, a University of Hawaii psychologist and leading expert on the phenomenon, likens it to road rage. While we often talk about sidewalk rage as an internal irk, or “private mental venting that consists of irrational assumptions regarding other pedestrians,” the feelings can escalate through fantasies of “violent acts against the inconsiderate sidewalk blockers” in some to “the overt expression of hostility and aggressiveness," James notes. Yet for all most of us know about sidewalk rage, few understand where it comes from, or why some feel it more acutely—at times or always—than others.