Next time you enter an elevator, walk in and keep facing the back wall. If you stay that way, in my experience, people will laugh or ask if you’re okay. (That’s an opportunity, if you want, to say you would lovefor someone to define “okay.”)
Standing this way breaks unstated rules of how we’re supposed to behave in elevators. Detaching from expectations gives people an excuse to talk, to acknowledge one another’s humanity. Absent a break in the order, the expectation is silence.
(Of course, you can make a quick joke—my favorite is, if the elevator is stopping frequently, “What is this, the local train?”—and expect a modicum of laughter. But even if the joke goes over well, the rule seems to be that you can’t say it more than once in the same ride.)
The celebrated Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman saw elevators as microcosms of society. Described by the Times Literary Supplementas “a public private eye,” Goffman covertly studied people as they rode in elevators in 1963. He noted that the rule upon entering seemed to be to give some brief visual notice of other passengers, and then to withdraw attention, not making eye contact again at any point. (Though 35 percent of people added one or two glances to the initial look.)
Goffman called this civil inattention. That is, we act civilized toward one another—not harming anyone or blocking their paths or shouting in an enclosed space—but also not attentive. This goes on today, wherever people might be described as alone together.
[For more of this story, written by James Hamblin, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/hea...-inattention/497183/]
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