You’ve probably yelled it once or twice at a driver of a German luxury car blasting through a red light somewhere in the city.

As it turns out, there might be something to the expletive.

A new study out of Finland has found that argumentative and egotistical men are particularly likely to drive cars like Mercedes, Audis or BMWs, and those same personality traits can also explain why these people can be such aggressive and unethical drivers.

In layman’s terms: It’s a study into why high-status cars attract so many “a--holes.” (That’s not our word, it’s from the title of the study, published this week in the International Journal of Psychology.)

The paper asked 1,892 Finnish car owners about their cars, wealth and consumption habits, as well as their personality traits using a framework to assesses a person’s conscientiousness, neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness and openness to experience.

The result was clear: Men who drove high-end German cars had “less empathy, they are more disagreeable, and they are more willing to fight,” said lead author Jan-Erik Lonnqvist, who spoke to the Star from Helsinki while on his commute home from work — by bus.

That result wasn’t a huge surprise, Lonnqvist said. During his everyday life in the Finnish capital, he said he had often noticed that drivers who broke traffic rules tended to be behind the wheel of high-status cars.

He attributes that in part to “exceptionalism.” The drivers “might also feel that the traffic rules do not apply to them,” he said.

Other studies had already established that high-end car owners are more likely to commit traffic violations, Lonnqvist said. But there’s been a debate on whether this was perhaps because of the “corrupting effect” of money on a person’s morality.

The new study suggests its not the wealth itself that corrupts, but rather that already disagreeable men are particularly drawn to high-status products.

But not all BMW drivers are jerks, the study found. People who scored high for conscientiousness were also more likely to own luxury cars.

This is somewhat surprising for Lonnqvist, a professor of social psychology at the University of Helsinki’s Swedish School of Social Science. But it may be because these cars, in addition to being “flashy and expensive,” are also seen as high quality.

Conscientious people see themselves as reliable and dutiful, So they might want to “purchase a car that will last and is high-performing,” he said.

Interestingly, the Finnish study did not find that “disagreeable” women were drawn to high-status cars.

“This kind of car is not such a status symbol for women,” Lonnqvist said, hypothesizing that they maybe women have “other stuff that they can show off with.”

He cautions that the results may be culturally specific, as Finland is a particularly egalitarian society, in which men who drive flashy cars can really stick out.

In Toronto, men driving high-end cars have regularly appeared listed in recent police reports of serious collisions in the city, but not noticeably more often than male drivers of lower-end brands.

Toronto police do not have any publicly available statistics on aggressive driving and luxury cars; Traffic Services spokesperson Jason Kraft said he was not aware of any similar study on the subject.

Unfortunately, Lonnqvist said not everyone has appreciated his findings.

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Since the study was published, he said he has received a “staggering” number of hateful messages from the owners of high-end cars.

“Disagreeable men who are calling me up and telling me that they are not disagreeable, that they’re actually nice people and my study sucks,” Lonnqvist said.

“That has been somewhat surprising,” he said. “But it goes to confirm the findings.”