Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Akhilesh Narayan's avatar

Found the experiment really interesting and fun, and I love how well-written the entire piece is! It really got me thinking about a few things-

- I wanted to understand whether the distance was a fixed constant (like 3 ft, as shown in the diagram) or if it was always “roughly half the sidewalk,” as mentioned. I wonder how that affects the probability of people choosing to “pass through” rather than going around, because their “cost” to do so would vary in wider vs. narrower passages. For instance, if we fix the distance at 3 ft in a really wide passage, it might be much easier (lower cost) for someone to just walk around. But in a narrower passage, that same 3 ft might create a bigger obstruction, making it more likely they’ll just squeeze through. On the other hand, if you’re always blocking half the sidewalk, then in a narrow passage, the gap between the two persons might be so small that it feels more natural to go around. It’d be fun to see a robust method of controlling or varying this distance. It might also help boost that 7% rate of people passing through, giving more data points to analyse.

- Another point is how each location only had a constant 10 minutes of observation. I think that led to about 40-50% of the total data coming from the stations, possibly causing a bias by overrepresenting a “rush hour at a station” scenario vs a “lazy afternoon at a church” scenario. I was wondering how if instead of sticking to just time, trying aim for a set number of people at each location, or figure out some other way to balance the groups would differ the experiment. Even so, it’s really remarkable and surprising that the highest number of deviations happened at the church. I keep wondering if that was just an outlier or if its a general result as it’s non intuitive, which makes it even more fun.

- It would also be very interesting in seeing some sort of visualization showing a cross-sectional breakdown of ethnicities and age groups across all the different locations. Especially with the youth at the church deviating more. I was curious if these were mainly kids, or more like young adults?

- I also find the “sin theory” super interesting and honestly pretty realistic. I too feel that psychological factors can play such a big role given it is such an experiment. It made me think about another such factor- whether the consciousness of being perceived or judged in a structured, crowded, or familiar environment might push people to follow group norms more than in a setting where they don’t feel that same pressure. It’s just a hypothesis, but it would be cool to see if there’s a way to test this more formally or statistically in experiments.

- Lastly, I also think it would be pretty fun to run a logistic regression on all this data. You could treat features like gender, age category, ethnicity (I wonder if this is “AI ethical” xD), and location (maybe encoded in some clever way) as features, and then model the probability of “passing through” (1) vs. “passing around” (0). Would be fun to see its results.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this, and hope you decide to expand on this one day! :)

Expand full comment
Rutvi's avatar

This was such an interesting read! I loved the central idea of this experiment which even though seems trivial, says interesting things about human behavior. Great job on the blog post!

Expand full comment
7 more comments...

No posts