Monday, March 06, 2006
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Eyes down

One of the strangest things I've come to notice about getting around in a quite crowded city is the importance of (lack of) eye contact in making my way through crowds of people. It's especially relevant on busy pavements or in crowded stations where people are walking in multiple directions (there's quite clearly no "walk on the left (or right) side of the pavement" rule; that's another story). In such environments, the ideal situation is one in which you are able to continue walking in a mostly forward direction without stopping, running into anyone, or other slowing conditions such as the notorious face-to-face two-step (in which two parties come to a stop face to face in order to avoid collision, then engage in an awkward combination of mirror-image sidesteps, feints and muttered apologies before the situation is finally resolved). It is fairly easy to avoid a full stop or collision under most circumstances, but avoiding variants of the face-to-face two-step is more challenging.

It might seem that advance eye contact is the way to go: by making eye contact with an approaching pedestrian, some sort of nonverbal social contract can be established by which one party agrees to go one way and the other, the other. But my non-quantitative observational study of this phenomenon suggests that this is not the case at all: eye contact seems to produce face-to-face two-step situations. Perhaps this is due to some sort of urban primate aggression (cf. cardinal-direction-going Zaxes), but most of my own face-to-face two-step experiences don't give that impression (the other party typically has a sort of confused, frustrated look, as if someone is standing directly in their path). It seems like eye contact with a stranger is really bad for expressing something like "I am going to pass you on the right", perhaps because direct eye contact implies direct forward motion. Or maybe it's my hypnotic gaze; next time this happens I'll try issuing a command ("Bark like a dog") and see what happens. Oddly, and perhaps counterintuitively, this problem (I mean the problem of face-to-face two-step situations, not the problem of London being overrun by a Dunce-led zombie army) is much rarer when I'm walking and looking at the ground a few feet in front of me. The crowds simply divide as if by magic, and only very seldom does some idiot come straight on and block my path. Perhaps without eye contact, other pedestrians are using other cues to anticipate my direction (perhaps they're looking at the direction of my feet, or perhaps they assume I will continue moving forward in the absence of eye contact or other social cues). It seems to me that foot-level cues give a quicker sense of the direction of someone's path (and a more immediate indication of any changes in such). Anyway, yet another reason to avoid eye contact while taking public transportation in London.

Note: these observations are not likely to apply for road vehicles.
Monday, March 06, 2006 4:48:31 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [4]  |