Cars in the next lane really do go faster

When driving on the motorway, have you ever wondered about (and cursed) the fact that [tag]cars[/tag] in the other lane seem to be getting ahead faster than you? You might be inclined to account for this by invoking [tag]Murphy’s Law[/tag] (”If anything can go wrong, it will”, discovered by Edward A. Murphy, Jr, in 1949). However, a recent paper in Nature by Redelmeier and Tibshirani seeks a deeper explanation.

It’s mostly psychological reasoning, but the reasons are there in the link.