On Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 1:31 AM, Charles Haynes <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 2:20 PM, Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]> wrote: > A hypothesis! Is it testable? Let's see... > >> 1) Population pressure (and attendant perception, at a societal level, >> of scarcity of various resources - a perception that has a great deal of >> hysteresis built into it) > > If this is true, we should see similar sorts of behaviour in other > densely populated societies. Are there observable counter-examples? > What are the obvious candidates? China? Singapore? Brazilian favelas?
Lucky for you there is a Brazilian here. The answer is: kind of. In the city where I live (Sao Paulo), lines always form, even when not needed. Airplane boardings are not bad. Ambulances and police cars are given passage. OTOH, people speak in theaters, will cut in front of you in traffic and tailgate. In Rio things are different, though. No lines, traffic is possibly a little worse and there was an frequent annoying talk of how one has to "be smart" so as not to be taken advantage of. But they are nice over that when they know you. Interestingly some of the worst places are where people are poor or when they are a little richer. The poor because they don't want to be taken advantage of and the rich because they think they are different and entitled. I don't know if the two behaviors are connected. One place for where the Indian description looked familiar is Mexico. When boarding in Atlanta to Mexico and in Mexico City boarding to Houston. I had the two worst boarding experiences ever. There was a mob instead of a line, people cutting trying to get in before their time and ignoring every request from airline personnel. The traffic over there is very aggressive with little space for gentleness. >> 2) A collective understanding that "what I say" and "what I do" are >> essentially disjoint sets. > > How does one test this? I think though that this is the heart of the > issue, that it's actually cultural - a shared set of cultural norms, > though that simply begs the question. Where do/did these norms come > from? > >> 2a) A corollary to the above is the lack of incentive to enforce various >> _stated_ norms around appropriate behaviour such as crowding instead of >> queueing. > > If this is true we should be able to identify the incentives that are > present in other societies that do enforce those norms. What do you > propose as the incentives? I suggest instead that this is another > question begging "cultural" norm. It would be interesting to gather > observations as to which societies crowd, and which queue, see if > there is a pattern and extract a hypothesis from that. I think that the difference is not that they are enforced. They are enforced when a large enough group of people care. The problem is when too few people care. I've seen lots of small annoying behaviors change in my city over the last decade or so. Andre
