The study made some strong remarks about the kind of people who would modify their car’s exhaust. If psychopathy and sadism aren’t bad enough, apparently loud truck owners would do even worse.
- A professor in Ontario, Canada, has released results of a study of people’s attitudes toward loud vehicles.
- Having asked undergraduate business students whether they think such vehicles are “cool,” the result, not totally surprisingly, was that many of them do.
- Respondents also scored high on the “psychopathy and sadism” scale, but the study was only for cars. Truck and motorcycle owners, the study suggests, might score even worse.
A new study by Western University in Ontario says that if you’ve got a car with a modified exhaust system, odds are you’re a guy and probably also psychotic and sadistic. Slapping a Cherry Bomb glasspack on your Monte Carlo doesn’t (necessarily) mean you’re a Ted Bundy–level psycho, but the data someone points to a personality that enjoys inflicting unpleasantness on others. The study—catchily titled, “A desire for a loud car with a modified muffler is predicted by being a man and higher scores on psychopathy and sadism”—was commissioned by professor Julie Aitken Schermer, who heard many a loud car in London, Ontario, and wondered what kind of person would want their car exhaust to be louder than normal. She probably could have saved a lot of time by simply looking up Cadillac Escalade-V registrations. …
Yes, going out of the way to make something more annoying by imposing loud sounds on everyone around them is like yelling at everyone.
And importantly, it shows that you are not phased by the discomfort you are inflicting on others
In my experience most of them enjoy discomforting and upsetting others. It gives them some kind of ego high.
“I annoy, therefore I exist” - Annoying assholes
Where I work, I have to talk to customers through a window using a mic/speaker, and I have a customer who has like 50 “too loud? too bad!” stickers plastered all over his car, and he used to constantly show up blaring music at absurd volumes.
He’d walk up to my window and I couldn’t hear a damn word he said, and when I told him I couldn’t hear him he couldn’t fucking hear me either. It took several visits before he learned to turn his music down before coming to my window. He’s the dumbest customer I’ve ever had, I stg.
There were also a couple times where a customer actually opened his door and turned his music off themselves so that they could tell me what they wanted.
Real life trolls then? Makes sense to me.
Yep, next do the people that listen to music on the train without headphones.
Probably because it’s pleasant and not discomfortable. You all being annoyed by something that pleases me doesn’t mean I’m any particular label. Quit trying to control others by categorizing them and dictating how they’re to be treated based on your labels.
*uncomfortable
Yep, you sound like someone with a modified exhaust all right. When I went to the auto shop to get my muffler replaced, as it had rusted a hole in it, auto shop owner asks what kind of muffler I want on it, with hesitancy. When I said I wanted a stock OEM, he smiled broadly, and while I waited for them to finish up we made fun of people who wanted attention so badly they acted like assholes for it.
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How do you go through life without grasping the very simple concept that your freedom ends where another person’s freedom begins. No it shouldn’t be tolerated that someone shits up the place with sounds they enjoy to the discomfort of everyone else.
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I think there’s a misunderstanding. Sure it’s fine to like engine sounds, and it’s ok to go loud in an acceptable setting (motor show, race). What almost everybody in this thread is taking issue with are drivers who modify their mufflers and drive around on public roads.
Lol you’re pretending you don’t know that others are made uncomfortable by these sounds while also admitting you know. Whoops.
this asshole is all over Lemmy waving his micropenis as loud as he can. If karma was a thing on Lemmy like Reddit, he’d be shadowbanned a long time ago.
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Wrong. My point is that just because it annoys you doesn’t meant it’s done for that specific purpose. There are other people in the world who like things you might not.
You do know being exposed to constant loud noises has a measurable impact on mental health?
No one’s saying “motor noises are icky!” (they are, but that’s besides the point.)
We’re saying that imposing such a loud noise on everyone around you is an asshole move. I’m sure most of us would be saying the same about people on bicycles blasting their music through a shitty speaker. Revving your motor in a residential area is the vehicular equivalent of going to the library and yelling at the top of your lungs.
Your argument seems to be that it somehow matters why you are being a human shitstain. To the rest of the world, there is no difference whether you like being a shitstain for some internal motivation, or whether it is explicitly for the discomfort of others.
In either case, move out to the fucking woods, and you can have your primal pea brain be stimulated by things that go vroom vroom for all I fucking care.
I’m not moving away from what I like because you don’t like it ya fuckin idiot. I like the sounds. You don’t. Go find your peace. I like a sound and you like ranking people by what makes them happy. You’re the asshole.
You don’t really seem to understand the argument. It’s OK tho. And not your fault. Some people simply don’t have the ability to understand, or care about something like the common good. As long as there are few enough village idiots like you, society sort of works. It sucks a little bit more, because your little stupid preference is to the detriment to everyone around you. Describing that trait as a human shit-stain, seems pretty spot on to me.
It would be the same as if you had a thing for smearing shit on every lamp-post. We sort of tolerate the village idiot. It’d be nice if he had the capacity to perhaps… not go around and do that stuff, because, how important is it reaaally to go around smearing shit on things? I suppose we’ll never know. It seems pretty important to him.
Also, “go find your peace”, is such a fantastic dumb thing to say, I almost want to applaud you. What does that even mean? It is peaceful, except when little Dumb Dumb returns home from their usually like-minded friends at 2AM and still thinks its a good idea to make vroom vroom noises. It’s not a big surprise tho. They weren’t raised properly, or don’t have the social intelligence to understand why it’d be annoying at 2PM, so why would it be any different at 2AM?
I’d happily go find my peace. It… and this might blow your little mind… the level of “peace”, in society, is at the behest of the weakest little shitstains’ comfort level. You, and those like you, are the low bar.
Some time ago, I’d attribute it as being selfish. You don’t mind everyone else being annoyed. You simply consider yourself more important. People who work night shifts and get woken up during the day, or just people getting woken up during the night. Anyone with kids, etc. It’s just not considered… Now, I’m more convinced this isn’t so much being selfish… as just … either just having a shit parent(s) who didn’t teach you basic decency, so you simply don’t know. Which, isn’t your fault. The other explanation is that you might just be a little bit sociopathic, so you don’t have the capacity to understand it. Which… is also not your fault. The third explanation is that the lightbulb never shone bright enough to notice anyone around you… you like the vrom vrom, and everything else is just a bit too complicated, and anyone who tries to take away your vroom vrom is stoopid. Also, not your fault.
If it smells like a shit stain, looks like a shit stain, and talks like one… I guess it doesn’t matter which explanation fits you. It doesn’t even matter if you understand why. You simply are. Whether you want to do something about it, meh, odds are you won’t. But if you think you are anything other than a piece of shit that annoys everyone around you… lol. You don’t really understand much of anything, and I’m a bit sorry for anyone decent in your life.
Cheers. Be better. Shouldn’t be hard. The bar is fucking low.
To prove me wrong, you avoid addressing the entire actual topic: that these sounds are inconsiderate and bothersome to nearly everyone else.
Great argument
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They say psychopathy and narcissism go hand in hand.
Assuming you’re being genuine, then you’ve just told us that you lack empathy, and your insistence that the above scientific study is merely others being judgmental and ‘labeling’ tells us where you stand intellectually.
I do hope you’re merely a C- level troll. If not, then good luck in life.Your insistence that I can’t like what you don’t like is indicative of extreme mental fuckshit. You wanna just stop doing all that stuff that I don’t like because I don’t like it, or is it specifically you who decides things for the world of the living? If you think so, you’re gonna need to try using some force.
The right to swing your arm ends where it would hit my face. You like the vroom vroom noises? Nobody cares. You make the vroom vroom noises in the middle of a neighborhood with a bunch of bystanders around who were minding their own business? Everyone cares. I experience physical pain from loud noises. They don’t just annoy me. They HURT. I’m that sensitive to noise. Keep your roaring shitbucket out in the boonies where the sound won’t knock me over.
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What is the article about my dude?
Please show me where I told you that you cannot like what you purport to like.
Being told that liking something that irritates or harms others without regard for others is indicative of being an antisocial narcissist is not the same as being told you cannot like that thing.
What could possibly cause you to equivocate negative perceptions as being told you can’t prefer something?
You got an issue if I “like” throwing trash in your yard?
What’s wrong? Just let me live my life man.
Speaking of force - my dipshit neighbor who just moved in loves his loud vehicle. I guess living close to a busy street and an international airport doesn’t provide enough noise for him.
Been thinking his gas tank is a bit low on sugar. Should I help him out?
There’s a Southpark episode that redefines a certain word to describe people like you.
Check out S13E12 - The F Word to see how the world sees you.
Keep your labels to yourself. Didn’t your mother teach you not to call names?
Didn’t your mother teach you that it’s rude to be excessively loud and bother everyone you’re around?
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Ah, so your mother was an inconsiderate asshole too. I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Truck and motorcycle owners, the study suggests, might score even worse.
ooh, sounds like somebody doesn’t know fuck all about anything, and is a reactionary! good luck being your miserable self, you’re gonna hate it
there are better ways. find them
fuck me, you again. you’re absolutely one of the dumbest pieces of shit on here. Selfish cunt who should have his tubes tied and left in a leper colony somewhere. jfc you’re such a stupid piece of shit. 🤦♂️
It’s loud when you have to release the back pressure of an exhaust with mufflers to scavenge more power by using a less restrictive muffler and it’s actually more fuel efficient. If you have a large turbo, you can actually overheat your engine because there’s not enough flow to release the heat. Sometimes people are assholes and like loud mufflers without having tune or supporting modifications. Harleys are loud just to be loud and have no power. Supercars are loud because they have more power. Hyundai Ionic N electric vehicles are loud just to be loud and pretend it’s an internal combustion engine.
(Obligatory acknowledgement that “psychotic” is not an accurate description of what the study or journal article said, that was an erroneous description by Car & Driver. “Sociopathic” or “sadistic” might be more accurate, based on the study.)
Psychotic is not the same thing as psychopathic. Psychotic is someone who suffers from a psychosis.
Yes, I was going to comment that this sounds “sociopathic”, but they didnt actually inclde that in the paper.
I wonder if its also correlated with a likelihood to drive at excess speed in built up areas, use mobile phone whilst driving, or otherwise things risk the safety of those other than the perpetrator.
“New study confirms that my worldview is correct”
Yeah fuck cars but this is dumb af. Who cares why people like loud cars, what matters is that we shouldn’t be allowing them.
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Truck and motorcycle owners, the study suggests, might score even worse.
From my anecdotal and personal evidence, I can confirm that every biker that makes their exhaust extra loud (which is illegal in Brazil, btw) is a fucking asshole.
There is a special place in hell for the guy in my apartment complex that starts up his motorcycle at 6:30am just to leave it there, loudly idling, for a good half hour before he finally drives off
Sounds like it would violate a noise ordinance and that he’s providing ample time for cops to come harass him.
Hopefully the police don’t murder people at random there. In Holland we have civil servants who are not the police who will issue fines in cases like this, which seems sensible.
Yeah I’m not advocating police brutality. Just tickets/fines will do
I had a neighbor like that when I was a kid. Drove me nuts. Not at 6:30 am, but he would just leave it there idling for an hour.
RRAAAHBBBLUBLUBLUBLUB
I’ve got an aftermarket resonator that I replaced my stock muffler with. It enhances some of the noises the car makes to give it a better, bass-y, rumbly sound (while also improving performance a small amount by reducing back pressure, but I’m not sure how much that makes a difference since I have catalytic converters well before the resonator).
But I was careful to find one that made the car sound good but not LOUD. Because I cannot stand people who run a straight pipe or muffler/cat delete on neighborhood streets.
Do whatever you want on a circuit, but that car should not be used where people live. Same with your modded Harley that’s louder than a jet, or your “off-road” truck that’s never seen a spec of dirt but sounds like a goddamn volcano.
I’ve got a similar after-market performance exhaust and I like it because it’s quiet except for when I want it to be loud, which I reserve for special occasions when I don’t think I’d bother anybody. And even then people say it’s not terribly loud from the outside.
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But now we can say “Scientifically speaking, they are attention seeking morons.”
No! They are not! That was the exact hypothesis that was DISPROVEN. They are not attention seeking, they are sadistic and trying to hurt people. They don’t want people’s attention, they want people to suffer.
Time to include this in the DSM
Edit: apparently the paper is more than a year old. And here is the doi to the original paper:
https://doi.org/10.5114%2FCIPP%2F162006I hate loud noises more than anything. If I were a dictator, I would make it open season on people with loud cars or motorcycles. Just on-sight, consequence-free murder. It would still be legal to mod your car or bike like that, you would just have to accept that everyone will be permitted to kill you.
Think of all the gun shot noise! You haven’t thought of the gun shot noise, Dee!
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If that’s what it takes to be able to sleep at night in the city without hearing assholes with modded cars doing donuts and running from cops :D
There are many steps to take before calling for the deaths of annoying people
Psst… I don’t actually want to kill people, I’m being facetious!
Sounds like you’re not a city person.
obligatory cities arent loud cars are loud. cities without cars are quiet
No, I love the city, I just hate these individuals lol. The two are not inherently comorbid, it depends on where you go.
The primary feature of cities is people.
Yes
So many people means there’s so many different kinds. If you want a specific kind of person, get away from diverse areas. Nobody needs to conform to your desires.
Funny that this came out of London Ontario, one of the most carbrained cities of its size in North America (I grew up there).
Not Just Bike’s - Fake London?
Yeah, same city.
What a dumb article and subsequent post. I’m anti-carbrain too, but this copium is at OD levels
The article was funny; the study was actually the kinda dumb part.
Were we expecting anything good from people whose only contribution to the artistic output of humanity is “HEAR MY CAR FART”?
Eh, the study design seems sus. It seems she hypothesized that such people may be psychopathic and lead with a survey which confirmed as such. Survey design is super tricky for psychological research.
Moreover, the students responding to the survey are not the car owners proper, instead these students are car enthusiasts. The level of car modding or gear headedness of the responder is required to lend credence to the study results.
Could someone comment on the effect sizes observed in the study? I can’t look it up right now. But the above are just my initial impressions, so happy to be corrected
I’m only going to bother reading the first paragraph of your comment since you didn’t read much either.
Their hypothesis before the experiment was that people who liked loud mufflers were NARCISSISTIC, not PSYCHOTIC. The results disproved their hypothesis and supported the new one.
To elaborate, they expected that these people liked attracting attention and having people looking at them, thinking about them. What they found was that this wasn’t the motivation, and rather, these people wanted to hurt others. They knew what they were doing was unpleasant and undesired, and that is why they do it. It’s very different than narcissists, who want to be liked and don’t go out of their way to hurt people for their own enjoyment.
the present study predicted that each dark trait would positively correlate with the loud car scale aggregate, and because typically modifications to vehicles represent criminal activity, it was predicted that sadism and psychopathy would positively predict the aggregate of the car items.
To me it seems like they’re saying “predicted” when they meant “hypothesized”.
Here are the questions they used:
The items were: “My car is an extension of what makes me a person”, “I think loud cars are really cool”, and “If I could, I would make my car louder with muffler modification”. Items were responded to using the following response key: 1 – strongly disagree, 2 – somewhat disagree, 3 – neither agree nor disagree, 4 – somewhat agree, or 5 – strongly agree.
I think what’s missing from the survey design are questions which explore intent, like “I would use a loud muffler when people are sleeping”. I also think the “makes me a person” and “really cool” wording is ambiguous because the answers are not necessarily related to one’s personality. For example “makes me a person” could refer to maybe “helps me achieve survival” to someone, and “really cool” could mean anything from deep interest hobby to expressing admiration of other people’s abilities.
The other issue is that their sample is only business students, so it’s not representative of the entire male population.
I think maybe they released this pilot to gather initial impressions, so it makes sense to be critical and make suggestions for improvements
Edit I think another issue is that people in general don’t understand the disposition of the loud muffler enthusiast, and the approach in this study is starting out with the assumption that the motivation is dark tetrad.
You’re right to be sceptical. The paper is poorly written, and overstates many of the results they found. The correlations identified between the car score and the dark tetrad scores aren’t really very high, the highest is 0.51! They produced a regression model and deduced that because the F-test had a low p value that the dark tetrad scores predicted the car score. The F-test, for clarity, determines if a model predicts the response variable better than a model with no explanatory variables.
Also worth noting that there were stronger correlations between the explanatory variables than for any of the explanatory variables with the response. They should have included interactions in their regression model to incorporate this, or even better tried a set of models and compared them with ANOVA or similar. As is it’s impossible to say if the model they found is actually very good. It only explains 29% of the variance which… Well, it’s a statistic which is better for comparing models, but it suggests quite clearly they most of the variance in the car score is not explained but the dark tetrad scores.
There’s a smattering of evidence in here that there’s some statistical link between the scores, but it’s not been well explored or presented, and there are issues with the statistical approach. Based on some comments in the discussion section I’d agree with your suggestion that the author is simply trying to confirm their hypothesis.
What are you talking about? A correlation coefficient of .5 is in the ballpark of or bigger than the correlation between human height and weight. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bottleneck isn’t in the reliability of the measurement.
Unmodeled interactions here also would only be able to suppress the explained variance - adding them in could only increase the R-squared!
"They produced a regression model and deduced that because the F-test had a low p value that the dark tetrad scores predicted the car score. The F-test, for clarity, determines if a model predicts the response variable better than a model with no explanatory variables. "
Yes, when you wanna know if a variable predicts another, one thing you can do is that you compare how well a model with the predictor included fares compared to a model without the predictor. One way of doing that is by using an F-test.
In case your 101 course hasn’t covered that yet: F-tests are also commonly used when performing an analysis of variance.
“As is it’s impossible to say if the model they found is actually very good.”
You say that after quoting explained variance, which is much more useful (could use confidence intervals… but significance substitutes here a little) in this context for judging how good a model is in absolute terms than some model comparison would be (which could give relative goodness).
Your criticism amounts to “maybe they are understating the evidence”.
Do you think the paper drew sensible conclusions, or do you just not like my arguments?
A correlation coefficient of .5 is in the ballpark of or bigger than the correlation between human height and weight. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bottleneck isn’t in the reliability of the measurement.
This is fair enough, my background is not in social research so to me 0.5 is a moderate correlation. Not sure what you mean by the ‘bottleneck’ here, are you suggesting that the correlations could be higher with a different survey?
Unmodeled interactions here also would only be able to suppress the explained variance - adding them in could only increase the R-squared!
Given that the explanatory variables are in some cases more strongly correlated with each other than the response, do you think the model without interactions is likely to be an appropriate way to analyse the relationship between the response and the explanatory variables? It doesn’t at all make sense to me to do one single regression model and say “The F test says this is a good model, so the explanatory variables explain the response”, especially with a relatively low R^2, and given the fact that there is evidence of multicollinearity presented alongside!
The paper presents the fact that they have done a regression model with a few good significances without any real analysis of if that model is good. We don’t see if the relationships are linear, we don’t see if the model assumptions are met. Just doing a regression is not enough, in my opinion.
In case your 101 course hasn’t covered that yet:
There’s no need to be rude. It’s perfectly acceptable to disagree with me, but you could do it politely.
F-tests are also commonly used when performing an analysis of variance.
Yes, I’m well aware, although I’m not sure what your point is. They haven’t done any analysis of variance.
As is it’s impossible to say if the model they found is actually very good.
You say that after quoting explained variance, which is much more useful (could use confidence intervals… but significance substitutes here a little) in this context for judging how good a model is in absolute terms than some model comparison would be (which could give relative goodness).
My point is that they haven’t made any effort to find a model that best fits the data, they have just taken all the available variables, smacked them into python or R or whatever, and written down the statistics it spits out. There’s no consideration in the paper given to interpreting the statistics, or to confirming their validity.
From the study:
Although the regression weight for age was not significant, the direction was negative, suggesting greater endorsement for the car items for the younger sample.
Not only was p-value for age clearly not significant, the confidence interval for the coefficient was [–.21, .17]… This includes 0 ffs! There’s no evidence here that there is greater endorsement of the car items in younger respondents. Why was age even included in the model in the first place, given that the correlation was near 0?
Like I said - there is some evidence here of an interaction, I’ll concede that in context the correlation isn’t bad for 2 of the dark tetrad items, Wild and Crafty, but the analysis they have used to present this information is not well thought out or presented. Personally I don’t think that a linear regression model is even the right way to analyse the data they have, I especially don’t think this regression model is a good way to analyse the data.
Psychopathic, you mean
I started typing everything below and then remembered most people that modify their exhausts want attention and most of these people with loud cars are young. They usually grow out of it.
I used a loud radio in my car to get mine when young. I still like loud music but keep it to myself.
Original reply
I’ve almost always lived in places where there was a mechanical inspection or smog inspection. There were a few times I had to temporarily let my car be loud and I hated it. These times were only when I was waiting on parts or talent.
Some people play the cat-and-mouse game with loud, modified exhausts and fix them when caught. Others like to modify their ECU so the car makes popping noises when decelerating.
Even negative attention will do, or at least complete disregard for the people who have to listen to the exhaust and don’t think “omg that car with the obnoxious exhaust is so cool…”
