Unsurprisingly, most Americans frown upon antisocial behavior. Stealing people’s stuff, bending food safety rules, or smoking in large crowds tend to generate a lot of stern reactions.
But get behind the wheel of a car, and all that disapproval tends to melt away.
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 “motornormativity.” This is the term coined by Walker and his team to describe the “cultural inability to think objectively and dispassionately” abou...