Meat head effect

I was inspired by Michi’s post, which is about people’s behaviour at the railway-station. so I decided to blog again…

The station in Bad Schussenried, which is always very crwoded in the morning, is a quite interesting place to study people. Although I’m obviously on “stand-by” (iPod level) I’m not sleeping. I’m studying…
A observation which I made with Mr. Schmid is, that if somebody decides to stand (for lack of seats) when he is entering the train, a chain reaction starts and far more people decide to stand during the ride as normally usual. Freely translated we call that the “Meat head effect” but the upperswabian name is much more hitting.

Another very interesting chain reaction is, when waiting people are occupying the stairs in the underpass (due to canopy and rain). When a persion is walking “consequently” up the stairs it can happen, that all the people are following outside in the rain, awaiting a train which won’t be there. I call that “stairfission” because of its incredible parallelity to nuclear fission. Interestingly, this effect works best when the densyof people per square meter equals about 1.8 1/m – the critical mass.

I normally have a fairly heavy backpack with me. In buses you usually don’t have much legroom (Economy class). Result: Let’s say I’m not quite happy when someone decides to share a row with me (except maybe it is a pretty girl and the rest of the bus is… you know). But, if someone’s asking, you undoubtedly have to offer that seat.
So the point is to have nobody asking you. – I perfected my technique over the last 3 years or so. I analyzed the algorithm I and other people use to find a free seat in a bus. [That could be difficult for Britains, but I think it will fit again when you change “right” with “left” and vice versa.] People normally search the (in direction of motion and relative to the gangway) left rows first. That results of the left-turn by entering the bus. The row of choice is clearly the right one (Britains: left… remember ;D). But when the bus fills, the right rows also begin to fill (from rear to front). You surely would need difficult differential-equations to calculate which row would feature a low neighbor-probability. So I empirically tried and found, that the 3rd or 4th row has the lowest probability.
Now some applied psychology and you’re done.

happy (social) hacking … 😉