I get asked the same question all the time by folks who don't ride motorcycles, and I'm sure you do, too. It goes a little something like I tell them I ride and have ridden for twenty years, to which they respond, "Aren't you afraid of dying?" Internally, I sigh, as it's the only thing non-riders want to know.
But in truth, yeah, I absolutely worry about it. I worry about the car and truck drivers not paying attention, or the construction company that didn't secure their truck's load correctly. I worry about all the wildlife around me darting from one side of the road to the other. And I worry about inclement weather all of a sudden becoming a monsoon, which happened to my wife and me in Hawaii.
I do worry about crashing and dying, but that's also why I pay attention to the road ahead, far more so than most car drivers will ever. It's why I talk to myself while I ride, and tell myself that I've got this, but to be aware of everything around me. And now I have a new form of self-talk to add to that repertoire as, according to science, the best form of perseverance could be telling myself, "I'm Batman!"
No, really.
According to researchers at Universities in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota, persevering through something difficult can become easier if you take "an outsider’s view of one’s own situation," i.e., pretending you're "an exemplar other—in this case a character, such as Batman."
The scientists in the study were testing childrens' ability to persevere in a task and how pretending to be someone like Batman would aid, or detract, in their ability to continue said task. What they found was that when the children pretended to be someone else, talking to themselves as some studly other, they could get through those more mundane tasks without distraction, or at least with minimal interruption by those distractions.
The study's abstract states, "This study investigated the benefits of self-distancing (i.e., taking an outsider’s view of one’s own situation) on young children’s perseverance. Four- and 6-year-old children (N= 180) were asked to complete a repetitive task for 10 min while having the option to take breaks by playing an extremely attractive video game. Six-year-olds persevered longer than 4-year-olds. Nonetheless, across both ages, children who impersonated an exemplar other—in this case a character, such as Batman—spent the most time working, followed by children who took a third-person perspective on the self, or finally, a first-person perspective. Alternative explanations, implications, and future research directions are discussed." But how does this leap to motorcyclists?
As I mentioned above, focus is the most important variable in motorcycling, and it's the lack of focus that threatens many due to our current screen-obsessed populace driving cars, trucks, and SUVs. Psyching ourselves up, pretending we're someone like Batman, however, could give us a further edge as we go about our days. We're focusing harder than we would otherwise.
Furthermore, and it being the impetus for this story, Karl Allen-Muncey on Instagram pointed out that there was further study on how the act of "suiting up" for something affects our cognitive state, along with how talking to yourself in the third person, can change how our mind perceives a difficult, stressful situation, i.e. motorcycling through traffic who are all too busy looking at their phones to care where you are. Basically, if you talk to yourself as if you were Batman, if you channel Batman's persona of calm, cool, and collected, and if you suit up with your gear as if you were leaving the Bat Cave to go fight Gotham's evil-doers (car drivers), you're more likely to be aware of your surroundings, safer while you ride, and come home healthy.
Like the study with the children, you're more likely to persevere. So from now on, I guess I'm Batman.
