Do ‘Fast and Furious’ movies cause a rise in speeding?
Does bad behaviour in movies or other media lead people to behave badly?
There is plenty of research on the link between onscreen media and risky behaviours such as 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 behaviours by people who consume that media.
But causality issues plague most studies in this area: People who engage in risky behaviours may prefer to consume riskglorifying media. These studies also tend to measure attitudes in controlled lab settings rather than in real life.
Amore 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 mayhemfilled “Grand Theft Auto” video games.
Other analyses of real-life behaviour were more troubling: Arecent 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 effect 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 soupedup street cars. Most studies of media and behaviour look at risk-taking or violence more generally, but the “Fast and Furious” movies emphasize one particular type of risky behaviour: fast driving.
Over the years, various police departments around the country have increased traffic patrols near theatres during the period of the movies’ releases. But what does the data show? Using detailed traffic violation data from Montgomery County, Maryland, 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 mov- ie’s release with the three weekends after, we found that the speeds people were given tickets for increased almost 20 per cent, to an average of 30 kilometres per hour over the speed limit, from 25 km/h.
We also found that rates of extreme speeding increased. For example, the percentage of drivers charged with driving more than 65 km/h above the speed limit nearly doubled (though it remained a tiny proportion of the total), to 2 per cent 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 theatres (often within 3 km), consistent with speeding behaviour 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 theatres 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 theatres (and Route 270).
To check that these findings were not 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 did not glorify fast driving. Speeding did not 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 do not tell us anything about the effect of media on other forms of risky behaviour. 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.
Adegree of caution on the roads, at least in Montgomery County, may be warranted in April 2020 when “Fast and Furious 9” hits theatres. Anupam B. Jena, M.D., PhD, is an economist, a physician and the Ruth L. Newhouse Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. Aakash Jain is an undergraduate student at Duke. Tanner Hicks is a research analyst at Harvard Medical School. New York Times