this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
194 points (96.6% liked)

Fuck Cars

15252 readers
1237 users here now

A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

Rules

1. Be CivilYou may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speechDon't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass peopleDon't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.

4. Stay on topicThis community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No repostsDo not repost content that has already been posted in this community.

Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.

Posting Guidelines

In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

Recommended communities:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 19 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

A few (major) caveats:

(edit: I previously misread the author's information; she does work at UWO)

  • The study is being filtered through a blog post.
  • The study itself is written by one author and published in a journal by the University of Gdańsk of little import. That's, of course, just an indicator it might not be the most credible.
  • I will defend psychology as a science until I'm blue in the face, but it is right now undergoing a serious replication crisis, especially because of its poorly representative sampling.
  • The sample is: "A sample of 529 (52% men) undergraduate business students", which is a laughably biased sample compared to a global population. They never say which university, but given ~~the publication and~~ the author's workplace, it's safe to revise that to "529 (52% men) undergraduate business students at ~~U. Gdańsk~~ the University of Western Ontario".
  • The study evaluates negative personality traits based off a "dark tetrad", which is a still-controversial extension of the "dark triad".
  • As the author notes, the mean score from the three questions pertaining to "I want to fuck my car" wasn't all that high (approximate total average of "somewhat disagree" on all three with approximate total standard deviation of a single "neither agree nor disagree"). This means the actual sample of people who had the problem being addressed in the title of the study was vanishingly small.

This, to me, is flimsy evidence at best even when I already buy into the basic premise.