Oblivious to a fault

Photograph: Fred Dufour/Getty Images

Have you ever had the experience of a walking texter, you know, the kind who's oblivious to their surroundings until they look up and you, and they, have to do a walk around because of this doofus imposing their will in a public space, an action akin to people not leashing their dogs, especially jumpers able to soil your clothes and piss you off to no end. Seems there's a scientific basis as to why this act is a total pain in the ass to us non-texting rubes.

SAVE FOR THE Macarena, the most aggravating dance a human can perform is that thing where you’re walking down the street and have to out-maneuver a pedestrian who’s texting. At first, it seems like they’re going to crash into you. Then they finally look up from their phone, at which point you have to figure out who’s going to swerve left or right. You both swerve left and realize that won’t work, so you both swerve right, and that goes on and on until you finally get mad enough to yell at them.

Call it the Smartphone Six-Step. Grab your partner, do-si-do, and toss them into the street.

We’ve all danced that infuriating dance, but now scientists have shown just how big of a mess a phone-distracted pedestrian can make not just for you but for a crowd at large. Researchers at the University of Tokyo and Nagaoka University of Technology set up “bidirectional flow experiments” in which two groups of 27 people (one team wearing yellow beanies, the other wearing red) walked head-on. In each experiment, one of the groups included three people looking at smartphones. The researchers placed these distracted walkers either at the front, middle, or back of the pack, while cameras above tracked everyone’s routes and speeds.

Each crowd has some leaders in front, and each of these is scanning the movements of their counterparts headed in the other direction to avoid collision. This interaction between leaders is known as mutual anticipation. “If it is me and you, at the same time I try to predict where you will be in the future, and you try to predict where I will be in the future,” says University of Tokyo computer scientist Claudio Feliciani, coauthor of a new paper describing the experiments in the journal Science Advances. Basically, you’re making split-second assumptions about how that person will behave and how you should respond appropriately. “And that's the mechanism that makes it possible to have this kind of collective pattern formation,” Feliciani adds.

If you’re lost in your phone, though, this interpersonal relationship—however fleeting—breaks down. The person who’s approaching you is monitoring your movements and anticipating your behavior, but you’re not reciprocating. You’re adrift, and that means the people following behind you are as well. When you finally make contact with a person in the approaching crowd, you fall into the Smartphone Six-Step, and the effects of that hesitation ripple back through your followers like a multicar pileup.

A total PITA without question.