Straight Pipe Sadists
Psychopaths, the lot of you says Boffin
You know the car. Two streets away at three in the morning you can hear an exhaust that sounds more like an MOT failure than a Ferrari.
We've dug into the science behind it and found a 2023 study from Western University in Ontario. Boffins looked at who actually wants to drive that car and the answer is more interesting than "idiots".
What the researchers found
Professor Julie Aitken Schermer surveyed 529 undergraduate students and asked them three things: did they see their car as an extension of themselves, did they think loud cars were "cool", and would they modify their exhaust to make it louder. They also completed a personality scale measuring the "dark tetrad": Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and everyday sadism.
Published in Current Issues in Personality Psychology, the study found that wanting a louder car was independently predicted by being male and by scoring higher on psychopathy and sadism. Narcissism didn't make the cut.
One interpretation is that the desire to make your car deliberately louder is not, primarily, about showing off, it's about quite enjoying the fact that everyone else has to put up with it.
Not a Strong Case
It's one pilot study, with one sample of business students at one Canadian university. Schermer said she planned to expand the work, but it looks like she lost interest!
Was I sadistic psychopath when I drilled holes in the back box of my Mark 2 Capri... don't think so. Probably just a bit of a knob.
« Back to Blog