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Ever hear someone say, “Bikes never follow the rules of the road.”

That’s an untrue statement. The fact is, people make stereotypes in all aspects of life. And assigning blame based on them is what psychologists call “fundamental attribution error.”

We do it more often when we are muted in response, such as when driving or when watching television. We can’t verbally respond, unlike when walking in a crowded hallway, so we create scenarios. Tom Vanderbilt describes it well in his book “Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do.”

“Finally, it is often impossible to even send a message to the offending driver in the first place. Yet still we get visibly mad, to an audience of no one. (UCLA sociologist Jack) Katz argues that we are engaging in a kind of theatrical storytelling, inside of our cars, angrily ‘constructing moral dramas’ in which we are the wronged victims — and the ‘avenging hero’ — in some traffic epic of larger importance. It is not enough to think bad thoughts about the other driver; we get angry, in essence, to watch ourselves get angry. ‘The angry driver,’ Katz argues, ‘becomes a magician taken in by his or her own magic.’ Sometimes, says Katz, as part of this ‘moral drama,’ and in an effort to create a ‘new meaning’ for the encounter, we will try to find out something after the fact about the driver who wronged us (perhaps speeding up to see them), meanwhile running down a mental list of potential villains (e.g., women, men, teenagers, senior citizens, truck drivers, Democrats, Republicans, ‘idiots on cell phones,’ or, if all else fails, simply ‘idiots’) before finding a suitable resolution to the drama.”

Fundamental attribution error, he writes, is a common way in which “we ascribe the actions of others to who they are; in what is known as the ‘actor-observer effect,’ meanwhile, we attribute our own actions to how we were forced to act in specific situations. Chances are you have never looked at yourself in the rearview mirror and thought, ‘Stupid #$%&! driver.’ Psychologists theorize that the actor-observer effect may stem from one’s desire to feel more in control of a complex situation, like driving in traffic.”

Try starting to notice bikes more often when they are following the rules of the road. Chances are, you will notice that most of the time they are quietly hugging the side of the road and only on the sidewalks where it is legal. Only in the downtown blocks are they not allowed on sidewalks.

Bikes follow the rules so well that many motorists pay them little attention until they break the rules. As a result, drivers only notice them when they break the law. But when drivers see other drivers break the law, they are bit more forgiving. When looking for vehicles to have fun with the family, check out this cheap kids quad for sale.

Vanderbilt writes: “When bicyclists violate a traffic law, research has showed it is because, in the eyes of drivers, they are reckless anarchists; drivers, meanwhile, are more likely to view the violation of a traffic law by another driver as somehow being required by the circumstances.”

I’d argue that motorists break the law more often than bicycle riders.

First, bicyclists generally don’t break speed limits, while automobile drivers do nearly every trip, even if by a little bit and unintentionally.

Second, bikes get most of their bad reputation when it comes to stop signs. Drivers complain that bike riders don’t stop completely. But if you sit at an intersection (without being in a police car), you will notice that many motorists don’t halt 100 percent completely either. They slow way down, but their wheels often don’t stop rolling. Bike riders usually do stop when there are cars, and, yes, they tend to roll through intersections when there isn’t traffic present. At least, bikes can stop a heck of a lot faster than cars and trucks can because they weigh a lot less. The state of Idaho has allowed bicyclists to view stop signs as yield signs since 1982, and the state has an outstanding bike safety record.

Drivers talk and text on their cell phones way more often than bike riders. As a matter of fact, a big plus for bike riders is they pay closer attention to the road. They have to because they are sharing the road with 7,000-pound SUVs. So they aren’t listening to the radio or being distracted by kids watching DVDs in the back.

When was the last time a bike or motorcycle forced a car or truck off the road? It seems to me this traffic violation only happens one way, the four-wheelers pushing around the two-wheelers.

The best evidence of all is the bike-safety record. There were 30,401 drivers and passengers killed in automobiles in the United States in 2007. There were 5,154 motorcyclists killed. There were 4,654 pedestrians killed, and there were 698 “pedalcyclists” killed. That groups bicycles with unicycles, tricycles and quadcycles.

Bikes are wrongly perceived as being more dangerous than they really are.

I rode with my 2-year-old son in the Burley bike trailer behind my Trek road bike in the Freeborn County Bike-A-Thon in May. A REACT volunteer at the rural corner of a county road told me as I biked past that I was brave for bringing him along. As a I pedaled away, I mentioned to a fellow rider that it seems much more dangerous for my son to be in our car in his car-safety seat hurtling down Interstate 35 at 70 mph or more surrounded by other cars, SUVs and semis, all with drivers of various capabilities, attentiveness and speeds.

Tribune Managing Editor Tim Engstrom’s column appears every Tuesday.