Hate it when people don’t use a turn signal?

“Every time you changed without a signal that was a violation,” the trooper told the driver.

When the man told Hinkle he couldn’t believe he was being ticketed for not using a blinker — because who signals all the time? — Hinkle offered to write, not one but four citations for every illegal lane maneuver at $125 each.

“He was like, ‘No, no, I’ll just take the one,’” Hinkle recalled the man saying.

And single ticket in hand, one that also cost him three points on his license, the man went on his way.

Think about it. The turn signal is the only means of constructive communication we have on the highway. (The key word being “constructive;” blasting your horn, flashing your brights or rudely gesturing are something else.) But if we’re honest, we’ve all been that guy who didn’t signal.

People don’t bother to flick it on when they cut someone off to get to an exit; or when they arrive at a four-way stop and expect others to divine which way they may turn; or when they suddenly slow on a fast-moving expressway because they need to be in this lane instead of that one.

“As I signal to change lanes, drivers almost always seem to speed up, as if I have issued some provocation,” said Tom Vanderbilt, author of “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us),” a 2008 best seller. “Part of the problem here is we have never quite figured out how we feel about ‘letting people in’ in driving; moving traffic is kind of a queue, but it’s not as if you’re jumping the line when you change lanes — though some people seem to think it is.”

Even some police officers, deputies and troopers say it’s an infraction that they are less likely to enforce than, say, driving without a seat belt. Yet, Trooper Hinkle and researchers who’ve studied the behavior say it is a proven trigger for road rage.

In the past five years failure to signal has been a factor in at least 1,356 accidents across Georgia, caused 455 injuries and one fatality, according to data from the Georgia Department of Transportation. Almost half of those accidents were rear-end collisions. So as thousands of college students begin to return to Atlanta in the coming weeks, and rush hours feel more intense as we race to pick up younger kids who are now back in school, we might think about paying more attention to a maneuver many of us neglect.

Watching our parents: ‘I call it road rage nursery’

So why don’t we do it all the time?

While driving behavior overall has been studied, the particular action of signaling for the most part has not been. The National Traffic and Highway Safety Administration, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, AAA and universities with transportation institutes including Virginia Tech, the University of Michigan and Texas A&M have not formally studied the practice.

But a handful of researchers such as Leon James, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii, has analyzed the maneuver. James, who has researched driving behavior for 35 years, says consistent failure to signal is a blend of ego and risk.

“There are a lot of regulations people consider optional rather than required and using turn signals is one of them,” James said. “We’ve acquired a kind of scofflaw culture in which drivers pick and choose the actions they want to perform and they do it if they think they can get away with it.”

James, who admits he didn’t always signal in time to safely switch lanes until his wife suggested it was her side of the car that would get hit first, said we actually learn bad driving habits long before we get our first license. He says that the way our parents drove, where we were brought up, what we observed on roadways as a child, even television and video games reinforce bad driving habits.

“I call it ‘road-rage nursery,’” said James, who has testified before Congress about the aggressive driving trend. “We make comments out loud, we’re critical, we’re angry, we weave in and out of traffic and that child in the car seat in the back is being conditioned to aggressive driving right from infancy.”

‘Driving is really a socio-technical environment’

While James sees not using a blinker as an aggressive driving behavior, Bruce Walker, an associate professor of psychology at Georgia Tech, sees it as something else. He also says he signals all the time, or at least he tries to.

“Driving is really a socio-technical environment,” Walker said. “It involves sharing, communication and courtesy. But then you’re trying to do that while operating this 21st century machine. Using your turn signal is communicating as a way to be a better driver.”

But very often our right hand is occupied by something else, a cup of coffee, a cigarette or more likely a cellphone, he said, while we’re trying to steer with our left hand. So signaling becomes yet another task in an overall action that should have our full attention.

Under what circumstances are we most likely to signal? It depends.

Two years ago the Society of American Engineers published a study by a former car design engineer in Dayton, Ohio. The researcher, Richard Ponziani, spent a year and a half driving in Dayton to document when people signaled and under what conditions. Of 10,000 drivers making turns, he found, slightly more than 75 percent used a blinker. But of the 2,000 cars he observed changing lanes, 48 percent didn’t signal.

Walker said that is classic “anti-social” behavior, committed while operating a heavy machine that can kill.

“So, you think, ‘If I don’t signal and just nudge it out there, they have no choice but to let me in,’” Walker said. “Not letting someone in doesn’t get anyone home faster.”

‘All drivers believe they are above-average’

Could a compliance campaign work to make us signal more religiously, such as the “Click it or Ticket” seat belt slogan created by the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety?  James, of the University of Hawaii, said it could, but a better approach might be to tie license renewal to a physical driving test.

Short of that, he said, it will take drivers being more mindful of their actions when they are behind the wheel, which means cutting down on distractions and looking at driving as a moral act that can have life-and-death consequences.

Good intentions and well-meaning campaigns aside, however, nothing beats a set of flashing blue lights and the threat of a fine, says Russ Rader of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

“All drivers believe they are above-average,” Rader said. “No driver believes he or she is the problem — it’s the other guy. That’s why education alone has never worked to get people to drive more carefully. People know if they don’t obey the law, they’ll get caught.”