Micromotives and Macrobehavior

Still another hypothesis is that most members of the audience developed their seating habits in other times and places, where they found disadvantages in sitting down front.

organization, interfering as little as possible with the preferences of the audience, we need to know whether we can subtly change their incentives or their perceptions of the auditorium so that they will “voluntarily” choose a better seating pattern.

A fourth possibility is that everybody likes to watch the audience come in, as people do at weddings.

An even weaker hypothesis is that people don’t even mind being in the very first occupied row as long as the rows immediately behind them are filled, so they are not conspicuously down front by themselves.

A third possibility is that everybody wants to sit where he is close to people, either to be sociable or to avoid being conspicuously alone.

That kind of analysis explores the relation between the behavior characteristics of the individuals who comprise some social aggregate, and the characteristics of the aggregate.

behavior or the choices of other people, are the ones that usually don’t permit any simple summation or extrapolation to the aggregates.

To make that connection we usually have to look at the system of interaction between individuals and their environment, that is, between individuals and other individuals or between individuals and the collectivity.

“interdependent decisions.”