Unlicensed drivers are prone to risky behaviour

Of course, the propensity to engage in risky behaviour may be a major reason that these drivers don't have licenses. As reported by Dave Cooper in the Edmonton Journal on April 18, 2011:

Drivers who get behind the wheel without a valid licence are more likely to take chances, traffic safety expert Barry Watson says.

They're also involved in about 10 per cent of all fatal crashes in Australia and 20 per cent in the U.S., and are also four times more likely to be involved in a fatal crash compared to licensed drivers...

...His study of accident files between 2003 and 2008, plus interviews with hundreds of drivers charged with illegal driving, paints a picture of drivers "outside the system" who are banned from driving yet continue to do so because they can get away with it...

...Driving to traffic court with a suspended licence suggests to Watson that "punishment avoidance" -or not being caught -was the strongest predictor of continued illegal driving. He said one-third continued to drive unlicensed and undetected before their court date.

"They would say I have been driving for 10 years and have been caught once, so I'll just keep doing it."

Exposure to dumbed-down content in the media can dumb you down

As reported by Misty Harris of Postmedia News on June 15, 2011:

A new study suggests that when people don't think critically about their media consumption, they're in danger of assimilating some of the mental characteristics on display. Specifically, researchers found that if the main character in a screenplay was a total imbecile, and people weren't expressly asked to identify differences between themselves and that protagonist, the participants' own cognitive skills were compromised.

In other words, stupidity appears to be contagious - if only temporarily.

"It's not like a disease, where once you have it, you have it for a long time; we're not saying you'll be impaired the day after reading a stupid story or watching TV," says study author Markus Appel, an associate professor at Johannes Kepler University of Linz in Austria. "But we do show that performance in knowledge tests is susceptible to fictional characters."

Just as video games put players at the centre of the action, Appel says storytelling implicitly asks people to identify with the characters on some level. And just as video games have been (controversially) linked to behaviour, stories can have a transformative effect on people's thinking.

"People are scared of being influenced by aggressive content but there are many other things to consider," says Appel. "There's much more to narratives than just entertainment."

In experiments with 81 people, Appel had different groups read a screenplay that featured either a protagonist whose intellectually abilities were undetermined or one in which the star was an alcoholic, aggressive and intellectually feeble soccer hooligan (think Europe's answer to the cast of Jersey Shore).

Half of those given the latter story were directed to think about ways in which they differed from the protagonist, while the others were given no such instruction before reading the tale.

Afterward, all participants took a general knowledge test, and those who read the story about the idiotic thug did significantly worse, on average, than those who read the story in which the main character's intellect wasn't addressed. The exception was the group that was asked to actively think about the imbecilic character's traits - a process Appel says kept the contagion effect from occurring, and ultimately underscored the value of critical thinking.

Go here to see the abstract of Dr. Appel's article A Story About a Stupid Person Can Make You Act Stupid (or Smart): Behavioral Assimilation (and Contrast) as Narrative Impact in Media Psychology, Volume 14, Issue 2, 2011, pp. 144-167.