🔗 Cars are rewiring our brains to ignore all the bad stuff about driving
That’s because a lot of us suffer from a malady called “car brain” — though Ian Walker, a professor of environmental psychology at Swansea University in Wales, prefers to call it “motonormativity.” This is the term coined by Walker and his team to describe the “cultural inability to think objectively and dispassionately” about how we use cars.
Think of it like “heteronormativity,” the idea that heterosexual couples “automatically, but inappropriately, assume all other people fit their own categories,” but for cars.
Walker noticed that people tend to have a giant blindspot when it comes to certain behaviors associated with driving, whether it’s speeding, carbon emissions, traffic crashes, or any other of the vast litany of negative external effects that result from a culture that caters to automobile drivers.