I don't drive. I haven't driven in decades. I had a meeting to attend away from the office so I ordered up a cab. The cab ran a few minutes late in arriving for me. As time went by I had the opportunity to watch a large swath of people go in and out on their errands . As I stood unobserved I noticed a number of odd facts.
There are a set of steps that lead up to the door of the office. Invariably someone going up the steps would be doing so at the same time someone was coming down the steps. At about the midpoint of the steps a person tends to adjust their grip on the handrail or their stance and they look up. As often as not they have to make eye contact with someone traversing the route in the other direction.
It is at this point things grew odd. Watching these interactions revealed the number of different social behaviors. On this day African Americans tended to greet each other whether or not they knew each other. Older people tended to greet each other regardless of race whether they seemed to know each other or not. The younger Chinese that came in and out seemed to have a sense of personal space and behavioral rules that precluded contact and made them seem somewhat rude by our normative behaviors.
The groups of white people coming through seemed too agitated and did only made contact with the person coming the other way if it was someone they knew.
I know it was only one day in one location and for a very short period of time but the differences in contact behaviors intrigued me. Long ago as an undergraduate student I participated in number of studies relating to the initiation of social contact. We did not look at issues of race or age relative to the contact behavior. We only studied position. If you're facing someone directly you are most likely to start some kind of conversation with them. If you were at a 45 degree angle the odds were far lower that conversation would follow.
There are no great insights from this. The differences were just interesting to watch.
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