THE HUMAN CONDITION GAWKING : Why We Hit the Brakes

You’re rushing to the Valley where your 14-year-old is Home Alone with the flu. You’ll take her temperature, fix her lunch, plump her pillows and be back at work in 80 minutes max--if traffic holds. It doesn’t. You slow from 60 to 30 to crawl. Then you see a guy with a flat. “These idiots stopped to gawk at a flat?” you fume as you hit your brake and turn your head to stare. “Oh God, I’m doing it too.”

Of course you gawk. Everybody does. It’s instinctive, inborn, a primal urge, like food or sex. It’s the eighth deadly sin, after pride and avarice. Even those paid to prevent you from gawking have a tough time not doing it.

California Highway Patrol Officer Michael Goins knows. “If there’s one thing that causes accidents, it’s people who take their eyes off the road. In that second, you’ll hit whatever’s ahead of you.”

Just the other day, Goins, who was off duty, saw an accident on the westbound Santa Monica Freeway at La Brea. “It was way over on the shoulder and as I got near, I slowed to sneak a peek. I don’t know what came over me.”

What happened is his brain took over, says psychiatrist Edward Stainbrook, USC professor emeritus: “Our brains are constructed to attend to anything unusual or unexpected. You focus on it, figure it out, leave it and go on. You’re doing it all the time, every day. If you don’t do it, you’re probably not a good driver.”

Ironic. The brain compels us to do what the CHP forbids.

More irony: People who complain loudest about slowdowns caused by gawking often are the most egregious gawkers. That word comes from Carlos Sepulveda, a driver for Sid’s Tow in Los Angeles for 15 years. He’s seen everything, he says, including people so angry at a slowdown and so intent on seeing the cause that they drive into the flares and sometimes into the accident scene. The real nuts manage to get around traffic by driving on the shoulder or in areas blocked off by police.

“We had one the other day, on 2nd Street. It was the end of a chase, where the criminal was caught after he hit a couple of cars. The LAPD had the entire street blocked off, and here comes this guy, right through the flares because this is what he wanted to see.”

What they really want to see is “blood and guts and anything gruesome,” says Jim Carrico, manager of the towing firm for 10 years.

USC clinical psychologist Chaytor Mason agrees.

“We want to know how does death occur, how do bodies get torn apart, what would it feel like if it happened to me. It’s the same reason that all through history, we’ve had spectators at any kind of catastrophe,” he says.

“It’s why crowds were attracted to public hangings, and why the coliseums were built. You’ll see that many people drive much slower after they’ve gawked at a traffic accident,” Mason says, “because they’re worrying about it happening to them.”

“Of course, being the well-adjusted psychologist that I am,” says Mason with a chuckle, “I know my own tendency to be curious, and so I steel myself by looking rigidly at the car ahead of me, not even using peripheral vision to sneak a peek. When the car ahead of me slows, I hit my horn in hopes that a CHP officer will notice and take the offender’s license.

“If I can’t look, I don’t want the guy in front of me to do it either,” he jokes. “But I often have a secret weapon. My wife is the designated observer and gives a complete report.”

It would all be humorous, Mason says, except that a few years ago he slowed to gawk at an accident at the exact moment the man in front of him hit his brakes. He does not want to repeat that near-collision, he says.

Gerald Davison, USC professor of psychology, says he knows better, but he just can’t stop himself.

“Afterward, I always wonder why I did it,” he says, adding that gawking is “a reaction to seeing something different than we expect. That triggers us to shift attention away from what’s straight ahead.”

Caltrans calls it “the gawk effect” and has done quite a few studies on the subject, says spokesman Russell Snyder. According to a recent study, even an accident moved completely to the shoulder of a three-lane highway will reduce traffic flow by one-third because of the gawk effect. If one lane is blocked, flow is reduced by 50%.

As a result of these studies, motorists are given “as little to look at as possible” on local freeways. That’s why accidents are towed away as quickly as possible. And that’s why “gawk screens”--those temporary plywood fences--go up wherever there’s major freeway construction, says Snyder.

“We’ve found that people don’t only look at what’s on their side of the road. They look at the opposite side too. So both sides get tied up any time there’s anything to look at.

“We’re experimenting right now on the 101 freeway road-widening project,” he adds. There, temporary screens hide construction. But in a more permanent effort, Caltrans is raising the height of the median wall a few inches to limit drivers’ views of the other side of the Ventura Freeway.

Captain Jorge Jarrin, KABC’s airborne traffic reporter, says some of the worst gawking occurs with some of the least interesting events--like when a driver is stopped by police and gets a ticket. “People like to slow down, look at the person who got caught speeding, and say to themselves, ‘I’m glad it’s not me.’ ”

But accidents provoke by far the worst gawking, Jarrin says. “The problem is so bad in Japan that they’ve even experimented with using big, portable screens . . . to surround the accident and shield it from the drivers’ field of vision.

“The trouble is, drivers tend to slow down, stare and wonder ‘what’s behind the big screen?’ ”