Superficial Intelligence

Have you ever noticed how people in the U.S. tend to walk on the right side of the sidewalk? Just as if they were driving (which you have to do on the right side of the road in the U.S.), people tend to use the right side of the sidewalk. Doing so helps somewhat in avoiding collisions. But, exactly why does this happen? Under what conditions? Is it really statistically significant or are my observations just not accurate enough? This would make for some interesting research.

Doing a quick search on Google Scholar, the most similar research paper I found was one from 1975 where they studied how people tended to avoid certain types of people as they walked. The paper, which is "Beauty is Power: The Use of Space on the Sidewalk" by James Dabbs and Neil Stokes, found that walkers deviated from their path to stay farther away from a male than a female, farther from two people than one person, and farther from a beautiful woman than an unattractive one. Their theory was that beauty, number, and sex were aspects of power which served to dominate various amounts of space.

So, in their case, users adapted what they understood as power to their walking habits, most probably not even being aware of such actions. As for walking on the right side of the sidewalk, what motivates this behavior? Is it because we are used to driving on the right side of the road? I believe this is the reason. When people don't have a set of rules for a setting, they apply the most similar ones they know. In the case of walking, the most similar situation to moving and avoiding collisions for which people have any rules is driving. Therefore, they apply their rule of using the right side to avoid collisions to walking.

Many more research questions can be asked about this. Does the pattern change when the number of people changes? Do different types of people exhibit different behaviors (such as left-handed people)? Does this behavior change in countries where people drive on the left side of the road? And, moving to the area that I like more, does this have any design implications for programmers? I know that question may seem like a long shot, but if it is true that when lacking a set of rules people use the most applicable ones in their repertoire, then we can use this knowledge to predict or at least study better the actions of users on unfamiliar interfaces. Whatever the results and the implications of the study, I think it would be very cool if someone dug into this topic.