VIDEO: Weirdest People on the Subway

People do all sorts of strange, awkward things in public places.

This video shows the weirdest people you’ll ever encounter on the subway.

Psychologies have actually been watching us on the subway and here’s what they’ve learned.

According to slate.com, if you spend enough time riding the New York City subway—or any big-city metro—you’ll find yourself on the tenure-track to an honorary degree in transit psychology. The subway—which keeps random people together in a contained, observable setting—is a perfect rolling laboratory for the study of human behavior.

As the sociologists M.L. Fried and V.J. De Fazio once noted, “The subway is one of the few places in a large urban center where all races and religions and most social classes are confronted with one another and the same situation.”

Or situations. The subway presents any number of discrete, and repeatable, moments of interaction, opportunities to test how “situational factors” affect outcomes. A pregnant woman appears: Who will give up his seat first? A blind man slips and falls. Who helps?

Someone appears out of the blue and asks you to mail a letter. Will you? In all these scenarios much depends on the parties involved, their location on the train and the location of the train itself, and the number of other people present, among other variables. And rush-hour changes everything.

So it’s no surprise that, over the years, subways have regularly been the scenes of applied psychology experiments.

Indeed, for a time in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as theories of “personal space” percolated through sociology, Edward T. Hall’s study of “proxemics” was having its heyday, and the field of environmental psychology was coming into its own, it seemed that any New York City subway rider might be some psychologist’s “confederate” and everyone else a possible bellwether of la condition humaine.

A banal note from a 1969 article titled “Good Samaritanism: An Underground Phenomenon?” from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology captures the spirit:

“About 4,450 men and women who traveled on the 8th Avenue IND in New York City, weekdays between the hours of 11:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. during the period from April 15 to June 26, 1968, were the unsolicited participants in this study.”

Although subway studies had their heyday in the ’70s, they’re as old as public transit itself. The seminal urban sociologist Georg Simmel, in a famous passage from his 1912 volume Mélanges de Philosophie Relativiste, was struck by the new spatial and sensorial regimen that transit provided.

“Before the appearance of omnibuses, railroads, and street cars in the nineteenth century, men were not in a situation where for periods of minutes or hours they could or must look at each other without talking to one another.”

By 1971, Erving Goffman, in his book Relations in Public, was noting that a ritual of what he called “civil inattention” had taken hold on the subway as in other spheres of city life: We acknowledge another person’s presence, but not enough to make them “a target of special curiosity or design.”