A sociologist who has traveled on long-distance buses for three years has formulated unwritten rules to help people avoid being around outsiders.
Psychological Techniques We Use To Avoid Each Other On Buses ("Wired Magazine", USA)
A sociologist who has traveled on long-distance buses for three years has formulated unwritten rules to help people avoid being around outsiders.
"We live in a world of strangers, a world in which life in public is increasingly anonymous," Esther Kim, a sociologist at Yale University, said in a press release. “Meanwhile, avoiding other people actually takes a lot of effort. This is especially true for public transport and other confined spaces."
Buses serve as a relatively cheap means of transport for long distance travel, but the journey can sometimes take several days. Being around an unpleasant person can turn this long journey into a protracted nightmare. Therefore, most travelers try to leave a chair next to them free and get a small but important space to stretch their legs, or curl up and maintain privacy.
Of course, politeness requires that this seat be made available for other passengers if they ask for it, which creates a silent struggle every time they board the bus.
To watch these psychological encounters, Kim traveled thousands of miles on intercity buses. She not only monitored the behavior of passengers, but also interviewed many of them, trying to understand their strategies. The results of her research were published on July 16 in the journal Symbolic Interaction.
“We try to avoid strangers by all means - we pretend to be busy, check our phones, rummage in bags, look past people or pretend to be asleep,” the sociologist says. "Sometimes we even hold a threatening expression or a hateful look."
Kim has systematized these unwritten rules and has compiled a list of strategies commonly used to keep the adjacent seat free:
• Avoid eye contact.
• Lean against the window and stretch your legs.
• Sit at the aisle, start listening to music and pretend not to hear requests to let you go to the window seat.
• Place a large bag or several objects on an empty seat so that they take time to move.
• Look out the window with blank eyes to look crazy.
• Pretend to be asleep.
• Put a jacket on the seat to keep it looking busy.
• If all this doesn't work, lie and say that the place is occupied by someone else.
However, that all changed when the driver announced that the bus would be full. In such cases, passengers simply try to avoid being around "crazy" people and try to sit down next to "normal" people.
According to Kim, the race, class, and gender of a potential neighbor doesn't bother passengers too much when they realize they have to sit next to someone. They are, first of all, concerned about ensuring their own safety.
"Ultimately, this antisocial behavior is associated with frustrations caused by the need to share a limited space with someone for a long time," says Kim. “At the same time, this deliberate isolation is a calculated social action that fits into the broader culture of social isolation in public places.”
