Berlin – People’s social behavior is repeatedly put to the test in everyday life. They don’t always fail, they often stick to the rules. It is even nicer when they undermine this by mutual agreement. Most beautiful when there are no rules at all and you still have to interact.
For example, if queues form in a halfway full supermarket, the audience is divided into several camps. Some are well-behaved, hoping at most that they may not have caught the slowest blow. The others send stern glances in the direction of the cash register and ask questions into the room: “Why is nobody doing anything?” And then there are those who are not afraid of the small appearance and speak up. “Could you open another till?”
These heroes step out of the crowd, legitimizing themselves to speak for them. The spectrum of these microcosmic representatives is broad: A young mother obviously acts out of necessity, hurries forward with the child tied to her stomach and expresses her situation, which is worsening every second, non-verbally with driven looks, while at the same time she apologizes for the circumstances that it caused. A vital pensioner at the end of the queue, who has waited for the daily rush hour to get two bottles of grain and a bag of Take Two, exploits his position of power as a customer and, by snapping at the cashier coram publico, leaves his pent-up frustration at the decline of the present from which he, if only asked once, would have stopped long ago.
But it is also easy to do with friendliness, with a little empathy in the voice and interest in the social imbalance of society, which is indebted to the workers in the supermarket, especially after the experience of the pandemic.
The real group miracle happens afterwards, namely when an employee – “Come on!” – floats past the waiting people. They follow this with their eyes and try to read from the smallest of body language fints which till they are about to open.
For every single supermarket customer – even if they have just dozed off happily – the lights and alarm bells in the control center go on at this moment. What should I do? Which parameters are important for the next steps to be checked? The decisive factor is the position in the room and in the current queue, from the order of which, however, claims can only be derived to a limited extent. Other more pragmatically sorted brain regions are concerned with comparing the contents of the car: Who can get through the fastest?
At the same time, the following complexes of questions must be dealt with: How justified is your own feeling of time pressure? Which social hierarchical categories – such as age, gender or class – have to be taken into account when forming a queue? What would be the contemporary and politically correct way of dealing with it? Should you follow the old school and get caught fulfilling ageist, sexist, classical traditions? Or would you rather contribute to the realization of equality by ignoring these categories or deriving an emphatically opposing behavior from them? The spinal cord contributes fear, flight and predator reflexes for decision-making. These trigger more archaic behavior patterns if you accept the survival-of-the-fittest contest or if you prefer to let the wide-legged and crucified ones go first.
Most of it happens unconsciously, regulates itself as if by itself and mostly without bloodshed. Perhaps one should try to get rid of the traffic lights?
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