The behaviour of information: social norms as information, applied to an everyday drive

Bridget Doran (BE(hons, civil), MET (transportation), PhD (applied cognitive psychology), Chartered Member, Engineering New Zealand

Bridget is a transportation engineering consultant and human factors researcher in New Zealand. Her work ranges from design and audit of built environments, through research and teaching on the interacting objectives of sustainability, inclusion, and affordable investment. http://bridgetdoran.nz

Say you are a middle-aged 9-5 commuter. You drive a half hour into an office from home each weekday morning. You wake, you dress, you have breakfast, you get in your car. Along the drive you accelerate and brake, you turn, you use your indicator. All of the other drivers do these things to, and for the most part, the system works and everyone gets there in the end.

Anyone who has watched urban traffic from an aeroplane might have marvelled at the smoothness of it all. The orderly comings and goings, everyone staying in their lanes. It’s very rare to witness a traffic collision. Most of the time, it just works, and that is because drivers operate according to the norms of behaviour in traffic.

Norms are “infrastructure for curating information derived from collective experience” (p3)

As a commuter you’ve built up a couple of decades of experience in traffic. Whereas a learner driver might baulk at being cut off at a junction, a calm and experienced driver will sigh and brake, then carry on again, knowing as they do that these things happen from time to time. An angrier driver might gesture at the offender, toot their horn perhaps. These behaviours are information to other drivers, who may have observed the conflict and form a view on its outcome based on their perspective and collective experience. If everyone toots, everyone toots: our ‘collective experience’ informs norms, because ultimately, we are communal creatures and we want to fit in. In traffic, our lives depend on fitting in, more or less.

So we do what we do as a commuting driver because we are receiving and responding to information all the time, updating our understanding: this is norms, in action.

“normative broadly implies a social pressure through which norms are maintained, promoted, or enforced” (p3)

There are few places where social pressure is more apparent than in a congested urban road environment. Say you are halfway along your commute to work when you are stopped in a queue at traffic signals. The light goes green. Say the driver in front of you

doesn’t move. A second goes by, another one. You suspect that the driver has not had a medical event (it’s possible, but not common of course) – more likely, based on your experience on these streets amongst these drivers, is that they are on their phone.

Before too long another driver will let them know it’s time to wake up. A toot of the horn, a gesture out the window perhaps. This is social pressure, enforcing the norm of not holding up traffic unless you’ve actually had a heart attack at the wheel.

As you press the accelerator and recommence forward motion, you are once again left to the privacy of your thoughts. The stopped driver in the queue was an interruption to your stream of consciousness rather than the content of its flow: It is important to remember however that when you get in the car to begin your commute, you do not recite the norms of driving to yourself, or even switch into a conscious ‘driving mode’ at all. The sheer volume of information available to you when driving a car is so great, it is not possible to process all of it consciously. We cannot, for example, simultaneously think about where we are going, and what the other drivers around us are doing, while maintaining a suitable speed and focusing on the radio programme blaring from the car stereo. We check in momentarily to all of these things, but maintain a safe and smooth drive for the most part because our motor control is automatic. We see, we drive, we get there, all while thinking about all manner of topics both related and unrelated to the driving task.

So as you drive along, you’re probably thinking about the household you’ve left behind, the work environment you’re heading towards, the changing seasons in the environment beyond the roadside, and what to have for dinner. These patterns of thinking are of course governed by norms too: we have social pressures, within the household, the workplace and beyond. We have hopes and dreams, and an identity in the world to maintain. When we are wondering whether to toot a horn at a stopped driver at the green signal, it isn’t just the norms of driving that govern our actions. We don’t want to look like an idiot to the people around us – if I don’t react, that might make me look ‘abnormal’. There are layers of identity and our place in society at play also.

“anomalies in other people’s behaviour or in our environment are noticeable. We are aware when something is not normal.” (p4)

In driving as in life, you drive as you live: when someone crosses a line, whether it is into our path while in control of a multi-tonne machine, or into our emotions with a sharp and unexpected quip, we notice. If the same thing happens over and over, we absorb this information as ‘normal’. We tell our workmate at the office coffee machine. And that is what society does, using norms to “curate information derived from collective experience”.

If something unusual or hazardous happens while we are driving, we notice. What happens next depends first on our evolutionary impulses - to brake for example, if we

sense immediate danger. Then, if we have time to reflect on what to do – if we are cut off, say, but a collision is avoided – we have an emotional reaction. In the cocoon of our own car, we might mutter to ourselves, or yell. We might have a passenger agree with our assessment of the other driver’s behaviour. We might gesture or yell into the traffic, hoping to ‘let them know how we feel’. All of these behaviours are experience butting up against the boundaries of what is normal, expected behaviour: of what and how much information to share, and how far into the community outside the car to share it. We might talk to others, or post on social media. In days gone by perhaps we might have written to the newspaper. Our choices depend on our assessment of what others will think, how those thoughts affect our identity and status in our little world, and whether we could influence that thinking through our actions: in short, our choices are collectively informative.

In 2026, a pressing challenge in understanding norms including in our behaviour as car drivers, is to define what this ‘collective’ is. In days of old, we got all of our information from people and nature around us. Before written communication, we talked. Before the internet, we shared text and ideas, on cave walls and printed manuscript. Still, until a few decades ago, we relied on local newspapers and conversations with the people we live among, to know what is going on, to gather and curate the information that governs all behaviour.

Now, with our faces in screens, information sharing has exploded into formats and media we cannot keep track of. The ‘collective’ is rapidly dissolving as online ‘communities’ take over from the neighbourhoods where grounded information was understood and curated from the literal soil, water and air around us. It is unsurprising that people are fractious. We cannot know how to behave when the person in the car next to us at the traffic signals has gotten all of their digital information from platforms we have never heard of, let alone visited, and likewise they cannot understand us. Further, there is no way to verify whether any of this information is true.

Imagine then that you have arrived at the workplace, exited your vehicle, and discuss the ‘normal busy traffic’ with colleagues.

Imagine also that your workplace is a local transport authority office and you are a transport planner.

What does your experience on the streets and in life teach you about planning our cities? What does designing for ‘community’ even mean in 2026? What more can we learn from the study of norms, to guide infrastructure and policy decisions towards a future for the collective good?

Next: On the role of infrastructure planning in fostering trust and community: equitable mobility, distributed access, and Third Places

Bibliography

1. A study of what drivers are thinking about at the wheel on their daily commute between home and work, including an introduction to in-drive thought sampling, categorisation of thoughts as task-related or task-unrelated, and the differences between environmentally and internally triggered associations. Burdett, B. R., Charlton, S. G., & Starkey, N. J. (2018). Inside the commuting driver’s wandering mind. Transportation research part F: traffic psychology and behaviour, 57, 59-74.

2. A framing of culture as a system of adaptive information-processing, wherein institutions (including governments) exist as stabilising infrastructure for human societies. Cardinal, J. S., & Loughmiller-Cardinal, J. A. (2025). The Foundations of Culture and the Moments of Social Information. Heritage, 8(9), 386.

3. Extending the definition of norms to explain their distinguishing role establishing humans as different from other social animals, highlighting the disproportionate, unnatural and maladaptive power of misinformation and disinformation. Cardinal, J. S., & Loughmiller-Cardinal, J. A. (2024). Information, entanglement, and emergent social norms: Searching for ‘normal’. Societies, 14(11), 227.

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