Matthew made an excellent point yesterday in class, humans love to put themselves in a box. To add on to this argument, I believe that humans additionally creatures of habit, and I did a little experiment to prove my belief.
Unlike high school, college professors don’t really have the time to create assigned seats for students, yet students routinely sit in the same area every single day. An extreme example being how despite having the choice of many open seats around the hall, many of my fellow CH 101 students choose to sit in a certain region every class( not for comfort, but out of habit.)
I find this crazy, and I decided to do a little experiment during STS class on monday. Instead of sitting in the back of the classroom by the window, I decided to sit in the front of class by the door, unknowingly throwing off the balance of the entire room. My disruption to the norm, eventually caused some of my classmates to follow suite, creating 3 additional disruptions from my original disruption. For the sake of superfluity, let’s call my disruption the “Root disruption”, and the following disruptions “Leaf Disruptions” ( It’s an E115 reference 😉 ). These leaf disruptions unknowingly caused the people who usually sit there to lose their “assigned” seats, creating 4 more Leaf Disruptions. Overall, this single change in the stimulus resulted in 7 additional changes, creating a large change in the typical classroom setting.
Finally, it begs the question. “If I had changed my seat every single day since the beginning of term, instead of randomly changing my seat halfway through term, would have been as drastic?”
Probably not.
Ooty..