Does this mean that a lot of the road kill I see is actually deliberate? Because, as a distance runner, that would kinda piss me off. Forget about the animals: why would you go out of your way to create a mess that other people have to deal with? Is there any other explanation for this behavior? (Maybe they were just trying to scare the animals away? Or trying to kill them before they made it into the road, reasoning it would be safer?)
Pardon the sensationalist headline of that article:
I was not aware of the other turtle and snake studies.
Note that with turtle this is the lower bound on percentage of evil; a perfectly amoral person that could e.g. kill for modest and unimportant sum of money or any other reason would still have no incentive to steer to drive over a turtle; and a significant percentage of people would simply fail to notice the turtle entirely.
This gives interesting prior for mental model of other people. Even at couple percent, psychopathy is much more common than notable intelligence or many other situations considered 'rare' or 'unlikely'. It appears to me that due to the politeness and the necessary good-until-proven-evil strategy, many people act as if they have an incredibly low prior for psychopathy, which permits easy exploitation by psychopaths. There may also be signaling reasons for pretending to have very low prior for psychopathy as one of the groups of people with high prior for psychopathy is psychopaths themselves; pretending easily becomes too natural, though.
Perhaps adjusting the priors could improve personal safety and robustness with regards to various forms of exploitation, whenever the priors are set incorrectly.