Very rarely do you see the gender of someone driving incompetently. So, most of this ‘personal experience’ is simply conjecture which can self reinforce.
Yet personal experiences do happen and shape us, and we talk about it and propagate the skewed perceptions seasoned with half-assed ruminations.
I'll make an example of how this works between well intentioned people:
My wife is an excellent driver. We live in small town, in a country where infrastructure predates cars. Roads are very narrow, often on steep inclines, and flanked by tall stone walls. My wife regularly complains of large SUVs stuck unable to maneuver. On her account, they are almost always driven by women. Her reaction is invariably: "if you can't drive, just get a nornal-sized car!".
As this happens again and again, with caring frequency etc, occasionally we talk about it ans wonder about this pattern and what may cause it, or whether it is real. My wife's theory is that some women feel unsafe in a car and solve the problem by buying a bigger car instead of getting some practice.
And here we are spreading crappy anecdata. But that's life, that's how human interact.
Physics. You can see a lot more cars than you can identify the gender of the cars driver. For example on a freeway at night, how many cars in front of you can you see vs how many drivers genders can you identify and remember.
Now sure, the smaller percentage may still add up to a significant number. But people do a crap job of limiting their mental tallies to only the people they actually verify. If they assume someone is say drunk their going to add that as evidence even if they never actually have any direct evidence for drunkenness/age/gender/ethnicity etc.
It’s a smaller sample than all cars I ever see, sure. But it’s still fairly big. If I look at a car I’ll usually try to look at the drivers face too, just because it’s useful information to know where they are directing their attention. I don’t think that’s particularly idiosyncratic and so it seems like a somewhat cheap argument to me to imply that people are basically just willfully deluding themselves.
The issue is cognitive biases make the total sample size irrelevant, which is something to be aware of. Unfortunately, said biases are not willful which makes them far more insidious a problem to notice and deal with.
Anyway, as a simple test try and count how many cars you can see next time you go for a drive, how many people’s gender you can infer, and how many you can positively identify based on their looks. It’s significantly safer to try this as a passenger.
> Anyway, as a simple test try and count how many cars you can see next time you go for a drive, how many people’s gender you can infer, and how many you can positively identify based on their looks. It’s significantly safer to try this as a passenger.
Might be interesting to try, but I think in a situation where I notice a bad driver I'm much more likely to identify their gender than in a random passing car.
But I live in a comparatively small Austrian city riddled with traffic lights, weird intersections, crosswalks, and way too much traffic in general, so I get ample opportunity to look at slow moving cars. If you're American your culture around cars is probably very different and that might explain why we seem to have a different intuition about this.
