Do ‘Fast and Furious’ Movies Cause a Rise in Speeding?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/30/upshot/do-fast-and-furious-movies-cause-a-rise-in-speeding.html

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Does bad behavior in movies or other media lead people to behave badly?

There’s plenty of research on the link between onscreen media and risky behaviors like unprotected sex, binge drinking, fast driving and even violence. One large meta-analysis of such studies concluded that exposure to risk-glorifying media is associated with risky behaviors by people who consume that media.

But causality issues plague most studies in this area: People who engage in risky behaviors may prefer to consume risk-glorifying media. These studies also tend to measure attitudes in controlled lab settings rather than in real life.

A more promising approach is to analyze natural experiments that show how people actually behave after being exposed to risk-glorifying media.

Several such studies show, perhaps counterintuitively, that violent video game releases have no effect on crime or even decrease it (through an “incapacitation effect,” because, for some, playing video games may be a substitute for crime). In the Netherlands, violent crime decreased after releases of the mayhem-filled “Grand Theft Auto” video games.

Other analyses of real-life behavior were more troubling: A recent study found that searches related to suicidal intent rose greatly with the release of “13 Reasons Why,” a Netflix series addressing the suicide of a teenager.

In the spirit of these studies, we analyzed the impact of “The Fast and the Furious” series, Universal Studio’s largest-grossing franchise, with eight movies as of 2017. The movies’ focus is illegal street racing and heists, featuring reckless driving and souped-up street cars. Most studies of media and behavior look at risk-taking or violence more generally, but the “Fast and Furious” movies emphasize one particular type of risky behavior: fast driving.

Over the years, various police departments around the country have increased traffic patrols near theaters during the period of the movies’ releases.

But what does the data show?

Using detailed traffic violation data from Montgomery County, Md., we were able to examine all speeding tickets there from 2012 to 2017. This length of time allowed us to investigate the effect of three movies in the “Fast and Furious” series. Looking at the 192,892 speeding tickets recorded, we analyzed the average miles per hour over the speed limit that drivers were charged with going on a given day.

We found a large increase in the average speed of drivers who received speeding tickets on the weekends after “Fast and Furious” releases. Comparing the three weekends before each movie’s release with the three weekends after, we found that the speeds people were given tickets for increased almost 20 percent, to an average of 19 miles per hour over the speed limit, from 16 miles per hour.

We also found that rates of extreme speeding increased. For example, the percentage of drivers charged with driving more than 40 miles per hour above the speed limit nearly doubled (though it remained a tiny proportion of the total), to 2 percent of all violations.

Additionally, using data on latitude and longitude reported in the tickets, we found that increases in this extreme speeding were concentrated in areas close to movie theaters (often within two miles), consistent with speeding behavior induced by moviegoing.

We compared the geographic distribution of these extreme speeding violations in the three weekends before versus after movie releases. We found that the vast majority of tickets handed out in the three weekends after movie releases occurred on Route 270, a major highway that runs adjacent to several large movie theaters in the county.

During the three weekends before movie releases, extreme speeding violations were not only less common but were also, on average, farther from the movie theaters (and Route 270).

To check that these findings weren’t spurious, we looked at speeding tickets after the release of four movies in “The Hunger Games” series, another popular franchise in the same time period that didn’t glorify fast driving. Speeding didn’t go up.

We also performed a “falsification test.” When we looked at the dates of “Fast and Furious” releases and compared them with the previous year, when no movie was released, there was no effect on speeding.

Our analysis was limited. Our findings don’t tell us anything about the impact of media on other forms of risky behavior. We also had data from only one large county and insufficient data to assess relationships among specific age groups or among vehicles more often implicated in high-speed driving.

Nonetheless, our analysis suggests that watching Dom Toretto (played by Vin Diesel) and crew streak across movie screens can inspire moviegoers to do some dangerously fast and furious driving themselves.

A degree of caution on the roads, at least in Montgomery County, may be warranted in April 2020 when “Fast and Furious 9” is expected to hit the theaters.

Anupam B. Jena, M.D., Ph.D., is an economist, a physician and the Ruth L. Newhouse Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. Follow him on Twitter at @AnupamBJena. Aakash Jain is an undergraduate student at Duke. Tanner Hicks is a research analyst at Harvard Medical School. Follow him on Twitter at @tannerhicks42.