For millennia, humanity had used a simple trick to walk without being hit by the elements: look ahead. This old maxim has passed to a better life in recent years. The popularization of smartphones has filled the streets with people engrossed in their screens, wandering through the cities without paying much attention to their surroundings. None of us are absolved from sin. You have been one of those people; I have been; we all have been.
What if. That has made us the worst. Even science knows.
Knowledge. Given that there is no area of knowledge that science has not investigated to its ultimate consequences, the number of works dedicated to the way we walk down the street, or rather, to how thousands of individuals subconsciously synchronize their movements to facilitate step from one to the other is quite high. There are two main hypotheses: on the one hand, “mutual anticipation”; on the other, the “alignment” with the fastest leaders of the group.
How does it work. The first theory points to a series of subconscious decisions and non-verbal communication. When walking down the street, we anticipate the movements of the rest of the passers-by (fleeting glances, bodily tracks) and we adapt our path to avoid the collision (those little seconds of impasse in which we choose to move to the left or to the right). We do it constantly and in unison, which facilitates fluid movement, in a kind of collective intelligence.
The second, developed in somewhat more detail in this study, speaks of “attraction.” When we walk in a group we tend to locate the fastest individuals and adapt to their pace and direction. We look for leaders to break through the crowd. It is an idea that has also spread to the animal kingdom, an alignment of rhythm. Other works have explained both mechanisms under the idea of a “repulsive force”, in the electrostatic way, that drives us to change direction when we get too close to someone (avoiding contact).
The problem. But what happens to this fancy mechanism when we introduce the variable “smartphone”? This is what a group of experts from the University of Tokyo wanted to find out. Their results, compiled in this research, are illustrative. The work experimented at street level with 27 volunteers. Half of them received yellow hats; the other half, red. The authors simulated several situations in which both groups were face to face and recorded their behavior in a shot from above to see how they solved each problem.
leaderless. When none of the participants looked at their mobile phone while walking, the two groups behaved as planned: the people in front of each one of them, the leaders, chose different paths to avoid human obstacles and the rest of the group companions followed. your steps. Anticipation, attraction, alignment, etc. The key here lies in the leaders. When we enter a large crowd (concert) someone leads the way and opens the way; the others follow him.
“I try to predict where you will be in the future and you try to predict where I will be in the future,” explains one of the authors in Wired, “and that mechanism is what allows you to have this kind of collective formation.” It happens that this whole system goes to waste when that Leader he walks looking at his screen. Attentive to other questions, our reading of the situation disappears. Instead of looking for an efficient path to the end of the crowd, we wander through the mass.
breaking everything. This makes us more prone to shock, misleading the companions who walk in our direction tied to our wake. That is when the collective choreography breaks down and an erratic dance begins: people attentive to their surroundings try to predict our movements, but when we are looking at the mobile we are not able to calculate theirs. Confusion, contact, anger. Thousands of years of non-verbal reading and fine subconscious analysis flushed down the toilet.
The rhythms. The work is interesting because it sheds light on the dynamics that underpin the daily hustle and bustle of the masses, both in large cities and in massive events such as hajj. A hustle and bustle that is not monotonous and that changes depending on the culture of each country or large city: we know that people do not walk at the same speed everywhere and that the patterns of collective movement (the label by which we read each other others on the street) are different in Singapore or Paris. All of them have something in common: those who look at the mobile break everything.
Image: University of Tokyo