There is a medical treatise, "On Assholes", just waiting to be written here, in much the same way that Harry G. Frankfurt introduced us to the technical academic concept of 'bullshit' in his book "On Bullshit".
While looking for that in the local libraries I saw there's an update? variant? "Assholes: A theory of Donald Trump". Looks to be mostly the same book, just with Trump's face added to the cover. There's also quite a lot of other books about dealing with assholes. "I knew it! I'm surrounded by (books about) assholes!".
Participants were 529 (289 men, 234 women, and 6 identified as other) undergraduate business students with a mean age of 18.14 years (SD = 1.19, range 16 to 37).
Sigh. A sample of convenience.
Psychology remains the study of undergraduates.
If they wanted real answers, they'd go to bike events.
As a biker, there is sure a lot of peer pressure to have a louder bike. My s1k has the factory msport straight through akro muffler and a valve system that opens the larger exit, also bypassing the baffles in the 'lunchbox' underneath, at 7k. Meaning it's very quiet until it's being asked to go very fast.
Replacing the cats and lunchbox with headers gives under 1hp on a 220hp bike.
But, every meetup, multiple people are asking "when are you getting a proper exhaust system". Which is basically louder for no other reason but being loud.
> As a biker, there is sure a lot of peer pressure to have a louder bike.
I'm amused by vehicles which are very noisy when barely doing anything.
Really, almost all cars today have more acceleration than can be used outside racing. Most SUVs and pickup trucks today have better 0-60 times than 1960s muscle cars.
In normal operation today, the power train is not working very hard. Many pickup trucks now have fake engine noise in the cabin generated by the audio system. Not just electrics; gas engine vehicles too. Ford has been doing this since 2015, and most customers do not know it.
I guess this explains why in Japan very few of the motorcycles are loud. It's something I was surprised by when moving here from the US. It seems like in the US most (or perhaps many more) riders are being deliberately antisocial?
I’ve noticed in my own car’s forums that over about ten years, most of the loud-seekers moved on to other cars while the remainder of us have much more diversity of gender and ‘loudness’ interests. Our sample size of self-nominated participants is also a couple thousand, not at all restricted to undergrads, and anecdotally parallels the study: those who seek loudness uniformly present as men, and in large majority tend to treat prosocial-community responses with disregard, hostility, or mockery. So, this study tracks :) but that doesn’t excuse the sampling bias of business-degrees (a field of graduates which includes corporate executives and daytraders, neither particularly well known for their social concerns), nor the self-selecting and anecdotal nature of my own separate experience. Perhaps we’ll see a wider study someday.
> those who seek loudness uniformly present as men, and in large majority tend to treat prosocial-community responses with disregard, hostility, or mockery.
Is the loudness then just a big "fuck you" to the rest of the world or does it provide the loudness seeker with something besides the joy of knowing that they're pissing off everyone within earshot? If they were the last living person on Earth would they still go to the trouble to modify their vehicle for loudness?
I think it's a mix across the different kinds of people.
For me my car isn't loud right now, but I do just genuinely enjoy the thrill and sound of the car in "track" setup. It's too loud to drive on the street but it's a thrill on track. The loudness isn't the point and I wish it were quieter, but the different exhaust components give it the raw visceral sound that I love.
I guess you can think of it like the difference between music on the TV or music at a concert, the sound is literally different not just louder, and the context makes everything more visceral.
It's a pretty basic dopamine response, do something, hear something big happen, feel good. Real basic and, fairly universal. You may prefer a quieter car, but there is also a sound level that is below your preference. Your preference just happens to be different. You may prefer some other form of this concept. Maybe you like loud music. Maybe you like loud colors. Loud flavors. Maybe all of the above. That's fine, that's called a preference.
The hostility comes from the perception that someone wants to take away your toy. Again, it's very very basic, the same thing you see if you try to take away an item from an animal that is engaged in a dopamine response with that item. Like a dog eating something. They will bite you or at least growl if you take it away.
> The hostility comes from the perception that someone wants to take away your toy. Again, it's very very basic, the same thing you see if you try to take away an item from an animal that is engaged in a dopamine response with that item. Like a dog eating something. They will bite you or at least growl if you take it away.
Sure, but now replace “toy” with, “peaceful Neighbourhood”
The only reason anyone wants to take someone’s dumb truck away is because they made the the first move, destroying or significantly degrading something that other people enjoyed.
Real basic and, fairly universal. You may prefer a quieter car, but there is also a sound level that is below your preference.
I do not believe this to be true. My feeling is: some people (or rather: some people in some occasions) enjoy to be noticed, and some others enjoy not to be noticed.
Stealth mode might be occasionally useful, but personally, I want my car to be just loud enough that I can tell when it's running. I've used cars where I couldn't always tell and it sometimes resulted in stupid mistakes like leaving them running when I didn't mean to, or trying to start a car that was already running. It can also be helpful for people outside of the car to be able to hear when a car is approaching. I've never wanted a car to be louder than necessary for those reasons though and whatever noise it makes it shouldn't be annoying or intrusive.
I like loud music, but I have headphones and don't try to impose it on everybody else. There are probably tons of antisocial activities that promote a dopamine reponse, but most of us know better.
I wonder too. Maybe it could be plumage to seek attention, maybe asserting "superiority", maybe dominating. security/insecurity?
I do know sometimes when someone pulls up nearby with loud music coming out of their rolled-down windows... I wonder what putting on loud disney princess music would do?
Same reason someone would wear bright red shoes or a loud outfit, I guess. Maybe to you it’s annoying, but maybe to them it’s cool, loud, and fun. Seems easy enough to understand, even if it’s a little antisocial. Same reason punks do punk stuff, kinda, could be one way to look at it.
Happened for my car community too, anecdotal of course.
Two aspects I think, the clout chasers move on, and the remaining cohort are older with a bit more empathy for community and also better things to do than provoke the cops. No speaking for everyone with that last bit, there are still those that thrive on the chaos.
There's also tech to solve for having your cake and eating it too. Get a valve, loud for track days, quiet for the commute.
Self-reported data via an internet survey. Garbage science means garbage data. I wouldn't put any faith in these results. You can't swing a dead cat in a room full of business students without hitting a bunch of sadistic psychopaths anyway.
I'm not a car guy, so I used to think such ear-damaging decibels were necessary for performance but have since learned it's not required even for ultra-high performance road cars that can go >200 mph. While a 12 cylinder Lamborghini Aventador is louder than a Hyundai, when both are idling at a stop light, it's actually barely louder from 100 feet away. And yet people with real supercars almost never modify them to be louder than stock.
My wife is a serious car girl and drives her beloved McLaren well enough to be in the top five on amateur days at Sonoma Raceway. She's taught me that different supercars each have their own signature sound and to her it'd be sacrilegious to mess with such iconic perfection. :-)
She's in a club of other supercar owners that puts on a huge charity car show where members bring over $100M of exotics - and none of those cars are nearly as loud as the sonic assault from one of the hopped up $10k rust buckets that occasionally pulls up next to my wife at a stop light and makes our ears bleed revving their engine. They always want to race "the cute girl in the McLaren" but she never takes the bait. When I asked why, she just scoffed that they're all bark and no bite. Plus she has no idea if the driver is race-trained, if their rust-bucket is even safe to be near at high-speeds or if they have insurance. Her favorite line about engine noise is from when she was picking up her car at the McLaren factory in England. While track-testing it with one of the race engineers, he joked "as engineers, we see excess noise as embarrassing because it's wasted horsepower we failed to transfer to the axle."
The only thing I can really think of is a turbo Anti Lag System that you can get in top-end consumer cars like Mercedes AMGs. It’s that popping you hear when coming off the throttle, you’ll also hear it in rally cars. The funny thing is, the same popping can happen with any car if the timing is off so you sometimes get kids driving around with misfiring engines cause it “sounds cool” even though their car might not even have a turbo fan! It’s one of those things that if they were actually passionate about these machines they’d know they look like idiots, but they’re not so they do.
>Some incidents have led to injuries. In 2021, six bicyclists training for a road race were run over by a 16-year-old who was rolling coal along Business U.S. Highway 290 in Waller County, Texas, outside Houston, when he attempted to drive ahead of the group to engulf them in the exhaust. Two of the cyclists were injured severely enough to require medical evacuation by helicopter. The motorist was not charged at the time of the collision; local cyclists' groups were outraged. [13] He was later charged with six felony counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. [14]
I don't like the association of the word crafty with Machiavelli. "Crafty" is basically synonymous with hacker. You can be crafty without being a dick.
I don’t like loud exhausts but I’m also not threatened by masculinity.
There is a medical treatise, "On Assholes", just waiting to be written here, in much the same way that Harry G. Frankfurt introduced us to the technical academic concept of 'bullshit' in his book "On Bullshit".
Not medical, but there is a book: https://www.onassholes.com/
While looking for that in the local libraries I saw there's an update? variant? "Assholes: A theory of Donald Trump". Looks to be mostly the same book, just with Trump's face added to the cover. There's also quite a lot of other books about dealing with assholes. "I knew it! I'm surrounded by (books about) assholes!".
Participants were 529 (289 men, 234 women, and 6 identified as other) undergraduate business students with a mean age of 18.14 years (SD = 1.19, range 16 to 37).
Sigh. A sample of convenience. Psychology remains the study of undergraduates.
If they wanted real answers, they'd go to bike events.
As a biker, there is sure a lot of peer pressure to have a louder bike. My s1k has the factory msport straight through akro muffler and a valve system that opens the larger exit, also bypassing the baffles in the 'lunchbox' underneath, at 7k. Meaning it's very quiet until it's being asked to go very fast.
Replacing the cats and lunchbox with headers gives under 1hp on a 220hp bike.
But, every meetup, multiple people are asking "when are you getting a proper exhaust system". Which is basically louder for no other reason but being loud.
> As a biker, there is sure a lot of peer pressure to have a louder bike.
I'm amused by vehicles which are very noisy when barely doing anything. Really, almost all cars today have more acceleration than can be used outside racing. Most SUVs and pickup trucks today have better 0-60 times than 1960s muscle cars.
In normal operation today, the power train is not working very hard. Many pickup trucks now have fake engine noise in the cabin generated by the audio system. Not just electrics; gas engine vehicles too. Ford has been doing this since 2015, and most customers do not know it.
I guess this explains why in Japan very few of the motorcycles are loud. It's something I was surprised by when moving here from the US. It seems like in the US most (or perhaps many more) riders are being deliberately antisocial?
I’ve noticed in my own car’s forums that over about ten years, most of the loud-seekers moved on to other cars while the remainder of us have much more diversity of gender and ‘loudness’ interests. Our sample size of self-nominated participants is also a couple thousand, not at all restricted to undergrads, and anecdotally parallels the study: those who seek loudness uniformly present as men, and in large majority tend to treat prosocial-community responses with disregard, hostility, or mockery. So, this study tracks :) but that doesn’t excuse the sampling bias of business-degrees (a field of graduates which includes corporate executives and daytraders, neither particularly well known for their social concerns), nor the self-selecting and anecdotal nature of my own separate experience. Perhaps we’ll see a wider study someday.
> those who seek loudness uniformly present as men, and in large majority tend to treat prosocial-community responses with disregard, hostility, or mockery.
Is the loudness then just a big "fuck you" to the rest of the world or does it provide the loudness seeker with something besides the joy of knowing that they're pissing off everyone within earshot? If they were the last living person on Earth would they still go to the trouble to modify their vehicle for loudness?
I think it's a mix across the different kinds of people.
For me my car isn't loud right now, but I do just genuinely enjoy the thrill and sound of the car in "track" setup. It's too loud to drive on the street but it's a thrill on track. The loudness isn't the point and I wish it were quieter, but the different exhaust components give it the raw visceral sound that I love.
I guess you can think of it like the difference between music on the TV or music at a concert, the sound is literally different not just louder, and the context makes everything more visceral.
It's a pretty basic dopamine response, do something, hear something big happen, feel good. Real basic and, fairly universal. You may prefer a quieter car, but there is also a sound level that is below your preference. Your preference just happens to be different. You may prefer some other form of this concept. Maybe you like loud music. Maybe you like loud colors. Loud flavors. Maybe all of the above. That's fine, that's called a preference.
The hostility comes from the perception that someone wants to take away your toy. Again, it's very very basic, the same thing you see if you try to take away an item from an animal that is engaged in a dopamine response with that item. Like a dog eating something. They will bite you or at least growl if you take it away.
> The hostility comes from the perception that someone wants to take away your toy. Again, it's very very basic, the same thing you see if you try to take away an item from an animal that is engaged in a dopamine response with that item. Like a dog eating something. They will bite you or at least growl if you take it away.
Sure, but now replace “toy” with, “peaceful Neighbourhood”
The only reason anyone wants to take someone’s dumb truck away is because they made the the first move, destroying or significantly degrading something that other people enjoyed.
Stealth mode might be occasionally useful, but personally, I want my car to be just loud enough that I can tell when it's running. I've used cars where I couldn't always tell and it sometimes resulted in stupid mistakes like leaving them running when I didn't mean to, or trying to start a car that was already running. It can also be helpful for people outside of the car to be able to hear when a car is approaching. I've never wanted a car to be louder than necessary for those reasons though and whatever noise it makes it shouldn't be annoying or intrusive.
I like loud music, but I have headphones and don't try to impose it on everybody else. There are probably tons of antisocial activities that promote a dopamine reponse, but most of us know better.
I wonder too. Maybe it could be plumage to seek attention, maybe asserting "superiority", maybe dominating. security/insecurity?
I do know sometimes when someone pulls up nearby with loud music coming out of their rolled-down windows... I wonder what putting on loud disney princess music would do?
Same reason someone would wear bright red shoes or a loud outfit, I guess. Maybe to you it’s annoying, but maybe to them it’s cool, loud, and fun. Seems easy enough to understand, even if it’s a little antisocial. Same reason punks do punk stuff, kinda, could be one way to look at it.
Happened for my car community too, anecdotal of course.
Two aspects I think, the clout chasers move on, and the remaining cohort are older with a bit more empathy for community and also better things to do than provoke the cops. No speaking for everyone with that last bit, there are still those that thrive on the chaos.
There's also tech to solve for having your cake and eating it too. Get a valve, loud for track days, quiet for the commute.
> If they wanted real answers, they'd go to bike events.
They‘d meet a bunch of 1) people actively being assholes and/or 2) people with a lack of basic empathy.
Self-reported data via an internet survey. Garbage science means garbage data. I wouldn't put any faith in these results. You can't swing a dead cat in a room full of business students without hitting a bunch of sadistic psychopaths anyway.
I'm not a car guy, so I used to think such ear-damaging decibels were necessary for performance but have since learned it's not required even for ultra-high performance road cars that can go >200 mph. While a 12 cylinder Lamborghini Aventador is louder than a Hyundai, when both are idling at a stop light, it's actually barely louder from 100 feet away. And yet people with real supercars almost never modify them to be louder than stock.
My wife is a serious car girl and drives her beloved McLaren well enough to be in the top five on amateur days at Sonoma Raceway. She's taught me that different supercars each have their own signature sound and to her it'd be sacrilegious to mess with such iconic perfection. :-)
She's in a club of other supercar owners that puts on a huge charity car show where members bring over $100M of exotics - and none of those cars are nearly as loud as the sonic assault from one of the hopped up $10k rust buckets that occasionally pulls up next to my wife at a stop light and makes our ears bleed revving their engine. They always want to race "the cute girl in the McLaren" but she never takes the bait. When I asked why, she just scoffed that they're all bark and no bite. Plus she has no idea if the driver is race-trained, if their rust-bucket is even safe to be near at high-speeds or if they have insurance. Her favorite line about engine noise is from when she was picking up her car at the McLaren factory in England. While track-testing it with one of the race engineers, he joked "as engineers, we see excess noise as embarrassing because it's wasted horsepower we failed to transfer to the axle."
The only thing I can really think of is a turbo Anti Lag System that you can get in top-end consumer cars like Mercedes AMGs. It’s that popping you hear when coming off the throttle, you’ll also hear it in rally cars. The funny thing is, the same popping can happen with any car if the timing is off so you sometimes get kids driving around with misfiring engines cause it “sounds cool” even though their car might not even have a turbo fan! It’s one of those things that if they were actually passionate about these machines they’d know they look like idiots, but they’re not so they do.
I wonder if this correlates with people who blow whistles or play loud musical instruments at protests.
Looks like this guy never seen rainbow bluetooth speakers at tourist spots.
Have a look at every owner of excessively loud pickem up trucks and motorcycles too.
My friends and I always assumed it correlates with a small penis.
It is true for gun ownership, so I guess it is true for noise.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11143840/
Sadistic psychopathic MAGA assholes love rolling coal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
>Some incidents have led to injuries. In 2021, six bicyclists training for a road race were run over by a 16-year-old who was rolling coal along Business U.S. Highway 290 in Waller County, Texas, outside Houston, when he attempted to drive ahead of the group to engulf them in the exhaust. Two of the cyclists were injured severely enough to require medical evacuation by helicopter. The motorist was not charged at the time of the collision; local cyclists' groups were outraged. [13] He was later charged with six felony counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. [14]
[13] A teenager allegedly hit 6 bicyclists with his truck, sending 3 to the hospital. A biker says the driver was harassing them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/09/30/texas-teen-...
[14] Waller DA files 6 felonies for 'rolling coal' crash that injured 6 cyclists https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/transpor...
MAGA supporter who coal rolled (black truck smoke) onto protesters outs himself (Parker, Co)
https://www.reddit.com/r/parkerco/comments/1qbdx8a/maga_supp...
Coal rolled at the 'No Kings' protest
https://thewesternnews.com/news/2025/jun/17/coal-rolled-at-t...
The Cruel Practice of Rolling Coal
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-red-light-distri...
Can we put motorcycle owners in the same bracket?
Correlation doesn't imply causation
https://xkcd.com/552/
> Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
fascinating:
Crafty – Machiavellianism
Special – narcissism
Wild – psychopathy
Mean – sadism
I don't like the association of the word crafty with Machiavelli. "Crafty" is basically synonymous with hacker. You can be crafty without being a dick.
Also mid life crisis.
Manliness is the confounding factor.