Small Factors Add Up and Cause North Carolina Car Accidents
When we discuss North Carolina car accidents, we often oversimplify. For instance, you may learn about a driver who fell asleep behind the wheel and crashed into a school bus. You’d thus be likely leap to blame the driver’s lazyness or negligence for the catastrophe. This analysis might be correct. But we should not overlook simple, subtle, small things that can accumulate to create enhanced risk for accidents.
Consider, for instance, the fact that national holidays like the 4th of July, New Year’s Eve, and Super Bowl Sunday are more “dangerous” than normal days of the week. Why? The hypothesis is that more drivers, on average, drink and party on those days. Thus, there are more drunken drivers on the road. Thus, there are more drunk and driving related accidents.
Sounds simple enough, right?
But this idea hides a complex lesson. For instance, say in a typical town, you would have 20 DUI crashes on any given day; on a national holiday, you’d have 40 DUI crashes. But it’s not like only 20 people “got more drunk” than they normally would. The town’s population, as a whole, drank more than normal. So what you are seeing with these stats is a threshold effect! There probably were A LOT of people who drank a little more than they normally would. But the vast majority didn’t get into accidents because they did not reach the accident threshold – a combination of luck, genetics, etc.
We almost always pay attention to evidence above this threshold – seeing the DUI driver who caused an accident – but we don’t have a way of measuring the “dog that didn’t bite” – the DUI driver who got home safely.
Here is another way to think about this. Most people would never riot at a bar. But imagine if you’re at a bar, and your team wins. Suddenly people start getting rowdy and crazy and throwing chairs. You might “join the fun” and throw a glass or tip over a barstool or do something out of exuberance to be part of the crowd. You would never normally do that. But the social permission changes your behavior.
The moral is: we need to pay attention to small cumulative “things” that provoke us and misbehave on the road – driving under the influence of medication, for instance, or driving while fatigued, or driving long distances on roads that you are not used to driving on, etc. All these below the radar factors can influence your ability to drive safely.
If someone hurt you or someone you love in a car crash, an experienced car accident law firm in North Carolina can help you create a strategy to obtain justice and substantial compensation.
More Web Resources:
Small Causes Add Up To Big Effects
The Threshold Effect
