How to choose a seat in theatres: Always sit on the right side?
Organisms
show asymmetric behavior towards the position, either right or left side. The
scenario has been heavily witnessed in human beings, who show a high
correlation of the choice of seat, in cinemas, restaurants or theatres. The
inclination towards one side was investigated
by the research conducted by Weyer et al. (2006). The article posits that the
factor that compels people to choose the right-hand
side is not dependent on the importance
of the film or emotional spike caused by the actors in the cinemas. Rather, the
paper theorizes that aspects of behavioral tendencies such as visual attention
have more weight in influencing an individual to choose the right-hand side seat.
The
research question that was formulated to assist in getting more information
was: What contributes to the people favoring right-hand
side seats more than other positions? Such, the question leads in developing a
hypothesis that can be placed as, behavioral
tendencies compel people to assume right had seats more than the importance of emotional attachment of the film. The
extension of the work done by Karev (2000), affirms that the bias towards the
choice of positions is more pronounced in right-handed
people than the left-handed . Among other
authors, the question of choice leaning gives this article a more task to critically
evaluate the major reasons for that, and come up with a justifiable explanation.
The
author employed 171 adult participants aged between 18-65 years. The
recruitment was done randomly, but the
aspect of gender was controlled to avoid the biases,
hence contributing to the formation of a
strong conclusion regarding the issue. The participants were engaged in an
experiment of determining their likely position, which they could have taken in
an ideal cinema, theatre or restaurant situation. To achieve the objective, the
researcher used cites maps, with virtual seats and strategic screen positions. The
key variables that were being tested were
seating preference against behavior tendencies.
The
results of this paper confirm the hypothesis that was being tested. It was found
that a high percentage of the participants chose the seats on the right-hand side of the map. It was also noted that most of the people
preferred the seat on the back position, and that aligned linearly to the
screen. However, the positioning of the screens on the map could have lured the
participants to select a particular position, which might be different from a
real situation.