Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Public space simultaneously supports many activities, including conversation, free speech, and transit. However, individuals may have competing desires to use the same parcel of public space. Spatial coordination problems caused by these conflicts are partially solved with proxemic norms – tacit rules which govern the social use of space. But, while prior work has focused on how pedestrians orient to personal space, little is known about how pedestrians orient to interactional territory. In a field experiment with 1,138 participants, we show that pedestrians are acutely aware of others' body orientation and avoid walking between people who are approximately facing each other. We also show evidence of collective norm violations: pedestrians are more than twice as likely to breach a proxemic norm when preceding pedestrians have done so. This study shows how spatial claims in public space are coordinated and offers a promising framework for investigating the psychology of norms.