Elevator Musical Chairs

One of the most impressive things you see on a daily basis is the seemingly choreographed dance that happens in an elevator of strangers.    Like a buffer –seat in a movie theater there is an almost coordinated attempt by all parties involved to avoid standing in a way that could possibly mean that their arms or pants may graze one another.   I've spent the last 15 years doing a crude study of the elevator dance but I have always thought it would be an interesting psychological study to evaluate people's behavior inside of an elevator as  I have noticed is that people will get onto elevators and almost work in a synchronized fashion to make sure that they stay within a certain distance from their fellow elevator patrons.  

   The idea would be to evaluate elevator tapes and divide the floor space into equally sized but invisible sections.  I believe that people will move towards the least  crowded part of the elevator which obviously makes sense as people have a need for personal space but what I think would be interesting is that I've noticed people will subconsciously move to opposite sides of the elevator very often.   If one person is standing in the front left side the next person will squeeze into the back right corner.   The further one person positions himself from the wall will almost mirror that of another person.  It's like people perceive personal space relative to other people's personal space.  If one person decides that they will take up 1/3^rd of the elevator, the other person will do the same.      It's also interesting to see what happens when a third person comes in and how everybody will retreat in almost the same distance, it's as if people are working with some kind of gravity level where no one person can be standing any closer to any other person in the elevator.  When the fourth person enters everybody moves and before you know it all four are positioned equidistant from one another.    I don't think anybody ever expends a lot of conscious effort to it but if you were to graph the motion, my guess is that people would be very good at knowing exactly where they are and where their neighbors might be.    If you take into consideration real-weight, I bet that subconsciously everybody in the elevator distributes in such a way that the weight distribution becomes very even.  if a 250 pound person stands in the back left  and a 125 pound person in the front right a third will move slightly closer towards the 125 pound person so that the weight per square inch is almost equal.   The only spot in the elevator where this might be somewhat different is in-front of the number keypad as in most situations this is the last quadrant occupied especially if there is only a keypad on one side of the elevator.   This almost becomes an invisible fourth person allowed to occupy its own space.