Personal Space

Okay, one of my favorite professors posted this Freakonomics article on facebook, and I could not resist the urge to comment on it. A good portion of the American population has at one time or another flown in an airplane. And as times have gotten rough for the major airline corporations in recent years, it seems that someone brilliantly thought that decreasing the space between rows in order to add a few extra seats to sell for revenue was a great idea. I have flown a fair amount in my lifetime thanks to the fact that I grew up on an island smack dab in the middle of the largest body of water in the world with all my relatives residing tens of thousands of miles away, and I like to think that I know a thing or two about how airplanes have changed over the last twenty one years. And one of the biggest changes I have noticed is in the decreased amount of personal space alloted to each customer that rides an airplane (outside of first class, of course). I used to be able to comfortably rest my arms on my tray table and lay my head on them to nap on longer flights. But in the past several years I have not been able to do this (nor have I grown). And as this personal space has gradually been taken away from me and from any other normal patron of the airline industry, I have increasingly noticed and been offended by other patrons, particularly those sitting in front of me, who decide to recline their chairs, taking away even more of my personal space on those flights. And as luck would have it, it seems like the only person who decides to recline their chair in the area I choose to sit always happens to be in front of me.

Personal bubbles are real, people! And when you invade someone else's bubble on an airplane by reclining your chair, in order to retain a comfortable sense of personal space, that person then has to recline their chair, starting a chain reaction. This is where the Freakonomics article brought in the question of altruism.

I think the choice to recline one’s airplane seat is a great example of natural altruistic tendencies. Reclining one’s own seat increases his comfort, but only at the expense of the person directly behind him. Then, in order for that person behind to increase his own comfort level back to what it was before the person in front reclined back into his space, he must now recline back into the space of the person behind him at the expense of that person’s comfort, and so on. An experiment observing this behavior may be a better measuring stick of natural human altruism tendencies than the Dictator game or similar games since the behavior could be observed in real time and without the behaviors associated with knowing one is being observed in a laboratory.

Altruism is a natural human tendency. But selfishness is as well (i.e. survival of the fittest). And when individual capital is at stake, when a person has paid for their seat on a plane, does that make them feel entitled to that certain amount of personal space so as to get mad or irritated when someone tries to take it away from them? Is altruism sometimes lost in instances like this because we are fighting for something we paid for, a specific product we expected to receive? I think this definitely has a lot to do with it. Although sometimes seat recliners are just irritating on the basis of decreased personal space alone.


So then why is it that people are so particular about the atmosphere that they travel in? Sure, some plane rides are longer than others and it is definitely nice to be able to retain a comfortable amount of personal space when you have to sit in the same spot for 9 or 10 hours. However, I have seen these same selfish instincts kick in on all sorts of public transit having been a regular patron of the Honolulu and the Los Angeles Metro transportation systems for years and years and years. On the bus, people want to keep to themselves. Of course, if you strike up conversation people are more than willing to share a conversation or two with you in general; I learned this from an interactive transportation planning homework assignment I had to do for Mike Woo's class (former City Councilman in LA). But for the most part, people are happy to be left alone when they are in transit. They choose the seat or the spot that they view to be the best that they can get at the time they board the vehicle, and they plug in their headphones, read their books and magazines, or nod off in their own little worlds not expecting to be bothered by anyone else. And when they are bothered beyond the occasional casual conversation, it is irritation. Almost a violation of a social norm. But on buses, you can't recline your seats and invade someone else's space in that sense. It really takes a crazy person talking to an imaginary being (which has happened several times in my personal experience) to cause the kind of discomfort that the reclining of a seat causes on a plane. 


But knowing this, am I (or even are you) going to stop reclining your seat when the person in front of you pushes their seat down into your lap? Alas, I don't think I will. I won't be the first to do it, but because I was raised in this fine country full of individual rights and personal property, that tiny bit of space is mine by right when I purchased the plane ticket, so I think I will continue to reclaim my space by reclining also when (not if, but surely when) this happens to me again. I feel guilty, but what can you do? Where does the cycle stop? In such an individualistic nation, we are accustomed to having a certain amount of personal space, and without it life is uncomfortable. And boy does comfort mean a lot to us all.