Motornormativity

Early in 2023, several UK researchers published a study on what they called motornormativity. The subtitle was "How social norms hide a major pubic health hazard." I heard about it in this Twitter thread.

They had an independent polling company sample more than 2,000 people across the UK with five questions that were either about driving or some other activity, but were otherwise exactly the same. Then they compared the answers:

Here's the full set of answers. As you can see, responses could change dramatically when driving was mentioned. All except Question 2 were hugely statistically different. This doesn't make sense! The principle is the same in both forms of each question; only context changes:

They describe these divergent outcomes as a version of the special pleading fallacy. It happened with respondents whether they drove or not, so they looked at the larger socio-ecological framework that surrounds us all and came up with the term motornormativity.

We suggest this mindset isn't just present in the public, it's also endemic in policymakers and people who look after public health. This explains a lot of planning and policy decisions: they make sense if you assume everyone drives and that this can't, or shouldn't, change. We end with a call for policymakers to recognise their unconscious and institutional biases and to implement mechanisms to overcome them in planning and health decisions.

The full paper is online and accessible here.