It fascinates me that, at least in many situations, people seem extremely averse to sitting at the front of a room.
This only seems explicable to me as a conditioned behavior, acquired during school years when they and their peers wanted to sit as far as possible from the front of the classroom, in order to evade the teacher calling on them.
If I’m correct, then this behavior’s persistence throughout adulthood is confounding in multiple ways.
- Even in school, did it actually succeed? I wonder. I suspect that teachers might say no, of course not, I’m just as likely to call on a student in the back of the room as one sitting up front. Statistical analysis might reveal otherwise—but I don’t know, perhaps it would not.
- At all events, it does not really make sense to continue this behavior as adults. Since graduating college, I may have been in a few situations where a presenter called upon members of the audience who weren’t volunteering for interaction. But these have been vanishingly rare. It doesn’t really happen. There is no need to continue hiding in the back of the room!
- Yet people do this even when they are at meetings voluntarily—and presumably wanted to hear at least some of the program. It happens even at meetings when there are nearly endless questions for the speaker, presumably reversing the underlying logic of seating and making the front of the room the first place to fill up.
So many people spend their lives trying to sit as close to the back of the room as possible, though. Does anyone besides me even think about it? Is it just entirely subconscious? What is the deal?
