The game is yours to lose

Recently, I’ve been making an attempt to drive calmer. It’s all fun and games when you’re throwing knife hands and cursing like Mushu at the antics of other drivers. But it does make the drive more stressful than it needs to be. I’d prefer to drive more like a zen master, and less like the outro footage of Crank High Voltage.

This was actually easier than I thought it would be. The process I landed on combines the gamification, the loss aversion cognitive bias, and an awareness practice to help me be chill while driving.

Loss aversion

Loss aversion is a powerful motivator. Humans come with a strong cognitive bias to perceive a situation as worse if it’s framed as a loss instead of a gain. We treat the threat of loss with more urgency than the opportunity for a potential gain, as this presents an evolutionary advantage.

It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.
– Charlie Munger

For my driving improvement, the threat of loss is twofold - first, I lose the game of “keeping calm”, and second, I actually lose the peace I started out with. The idea to frame the motivation for the exercise as loss aversion came from Simon Parrish’s article on avoiding stupidity. In it, he relates a study on amateur vs professional tennis - that a game of amateurs is won not by the points scored by the winner, but by the points lost to the mistakes of the loser. Or put simply, the game is yours to lose.

Gamification

Gamification is the process of adding games or game-like elements to a task, to make it more engaging. It was the latest tech fad circa 2010. One of the success stories of that trend has been the language learning app, Duolingo.
However, it’s not just for tech bros to make their Skinner boxes more entertaining. It’s also a useful way to help you motivate change. All you have to do is find a way to make your task into a game. It doesn’t need to be super complicated - reframing your chores as “quests”, and giving yourself a reward if you get them all done is a classic for a reason.

For my driving practice, I coupled this with loss aversion. Every time I get behind the wheel, I reminded myself that the game was mine to lose. This became a habit pretty quickly, with the car as a trigger to remind me. To keep the win, all I had to do was to not “knife hands and judge” the other drivers when they did something myopically dumb.

This is a good example of a default win state for a game - useful for a task that relies on not doing something in order to be successful. If you’re gamifying your chores, a default lose state (in which you must act in order to win) is usually more useful.

It’s also worth remembering that this is a motivational tool - there’s no need to keep a record of wins and losses unless doing so would help you win more often. For my driving game, I simply use the memory of my worst trip to compare to my current trips to see how far I’ve progressed. The scoring system I use is binary - did I throw knife hands and say something aloud about other drivers? If so, I lose the game. I do score based on legs of the trip - so a round trip to the grocery store has two legs, getting there and getting back.

Awareness practice

The final piece in the puzzle is something I’m terming “awareness practice”. It’s not enough to be able to operate a vehicle without GTA 5’ing other cars, pedestrians, and buildings. You must drive defensively, and that requires awareness of what you’re defending against.

The way I accomplished this was by applying a technique my father mentioned in passing when I was learning to drive. It’s simple - while driving, narrate aloud everything you’re seeing, and everything you’re doing. I do this several times a week. The results can be seen almost immediately - your awareness of other drivers goes up, as does your awareness of how unaware you were. I’ve found it to be like exercising a mental muscle - the benefits accumulate with regular practice. Some examples of these narrations:

• “Car in front is braking, I’m braking to maintain distance”
• “Lights are green, lights are green, intersection cleared”
• “Approaching turn, indicating left, entering turn, exiting turn”
• “Motorcycle on my right” (Useful, since they are easier to lose in a blind spot)

Results

The results after several weeks are pretty good. I average less than one Mushu incident per trip now. My driving is a little less aggressive, and I arrive calmer. The effectiveness of this experiment is due in no small part to my use of multiple tactics. Gamifying my loss aversion, even in a simple win/lose game such as this one has paid off. By giving the problem no place to hide it’s gone away rapidly.

The awareness practice has also helped increase my situational awareness behind the wheel as well. One can only assume this makes my driving safer in general. I certainly feel like I’ve become a safer, more considerate, and less aggressive driver as a result. Overall, the experiment has paid off, with a mental health benefit for me and a lower risk for other road users.