Looking at looking at looking in elevators

Robert Krulwich, on NPR, looks at the research that looked at people looking or not looking at other people in elevators:

She’s in Finland now, getting her Ph.D. at the University of Jyvaskyla, but before that, when she was in Adelaide, Australia, she studied elevator behavior. Rebekah Rousi [pictured here] hung around two tall office towers in town, riding elevators up and down day after day, looking for patterns. When a bunch of people get into an elevator, she wondered, do they segregate in any predictable way? Do tall ones stand in the back? Do men stand in different places than women? Who looks where?…

The men who flocked to the back, who had a better view of their fellow passengers, were consistently older, more “senior” (I’m not sure how she knew that, but it’s in her posted paper) and many of them “weren’t concerned with ‘getting caught’ looking in the mirror.” They gazed freely, suggesting a sense of privilege. Younger, less powerful men seemed to avoid that space…