Comprehension

WALKING ALONG

You are walking along a narrow corridor or pavement when you observe that someone is approaching from the opposite direction. Your paths converge and at the critical moment you swerve to one side to let him pass. Unfortunately he guesses wrong, and simultaneously moves the same way. You both halt to avoid a collision, exchange apologetic smiles, but then simultaneously take a step in the opposite direction and so reach a second impasse. Sometimes further bobbing and weaving in unison ensues, and the situation begins to resemble a well-rehearsed dance routine. But the most striking feature of such encounters is how rarely they occur and how good we are at rescuing ourselves whenever they do.

The fact is that we are extremely good at walking, which is just as well because we spend a large portion of our lives doing it. That we also seem to be aware of its importance as a skill can be gauged from the inordinate significance which both parents and interested observers attach to a baby's first steps: with the possible exception of talking, no other developmental landmark is so eagerly awaited. Very recently, social psychologists have started to analyse walking as a skilled performance and to catalogue the non-verbal cues which prevent mayhem breaking out on a crowded pavement. The fundamental problem is navigational: how do we manage to avoid collisions, without the aid of the motorist's horns, indicators and elaborate code of hand-signals? As we survey the oncoming pedestrian traffic, we must first decide how it is organised. Who is walking together and who alone? Convention dictates that the solitary walker must acknowledge the unity of an approaching group by walking round it: to do otherwise is considered rude or even provocative. If the group is too big to permit this, it usually breaks up into smaller units to allow the lone walker to pass it without breaking the rules. People who are walking together demonstrate the fact in a number of ways. They may be holding hands or talking to each other, but the most reliable sign of togetherness is deliberately maintained proximity. This is most obvious when an obstacle is encountered or a corner turned: by adjusting their pace to re-establish contact with others, pedestrians make it clear that they are walking together and not merely along the same pavement at the same speed.
The latter - 'accidental' walking together - is a source of embarrassment. It may be construed as spying or a clumsy attempt at a pick-up, so we go out of our way to avoid it, altering our pace or even crossing the road rather than risk having our behaviour misinterpreted. On the surface, the action of walking alone along a street seems very private. But when we discover we have made a mistake - we have taken the wrong turn or walked past our destination - we tend to react as if everyone was watching us. We either try to disguise our error by stopping to gaze into a shop-window whose contents are of no interest to us, or acknowledge it with an ostentatious silly-me gesture. Such reactions suggest that walkers feel on display, a view which cannot be justified by the lack of curiosity which pedestrians objectively show each other. Social psychologists at Oxford have also addressed themselves to the question of how people manage to avoid collisions on pedestrian crossings. They filmed four hours' activity on one such crossing, and coded the body movements made by individuals at the moment when they passed someone coming the other way. It appears that men and women adopt quite different strategies to avoid collisions: men tend to face the person they are passing while women turn their backs on them, regardless of their own age and the age and sex of the other person.
In the next few years we must expect to hear a lot more about walking from psychologists and sociologists. It will sound so complicated a skill that many of us will hesitate to set foot outside our front doors for fear of violating the rules they will have revealed. But this won't deter the estimated five million Britons who treat walking, with varying degrees of seriousness, as a recreation.