Group behavior intrigues me. No, no…behavior in general intrigues me.
If you think about how you behave alone–say, in your car when your favorite song starts playing on the radio–that’s not necessarily the same type of behavior you would put on display at a company lunch meeting.
When you were a kid, however, you either amplified that type of behavior in front of your friends to try to impress them…or completely suppressed your hidden, burning love of belting out a Gloria Gaynor tune that would become your karaoke anthem in the years ahead and…ahem, yeah. (Moving on.) In other words, you probably tried your best to be anyone but yourself.
Lest I go too far off the psychological deep end with this, though, let’s keep this discussion shallow. For entertainment purposes.
When I was in junior high, my school installed the most impressive machines any of us had ever seen on a school campus–soda machines. At least, it appeared that way. In fact, to see everyone’s reactions, you’d think no one at our school had ever seen a fizzy, carbonated cola drink in a can IN THEIR ENTIRE LIVES.
Kids were running around at lunchtime tossing a football with one hand and hanging on to a soda for dear life with the other one. The lines at the soda machines were longer than the lines for actual lunch. Never mind that most of us brought sodas to school in our bags for later or that lots of kids would show up first thing in the morning with one.
Apparently, the idea of buying one from the new doohickey plugged into the wall was all the rage.
I observed this phenomenon as a seventh-grader–as it was happening–yet I still brought quarters from home for the soda machine (I needed all the cool points I could get…I was tired of being picked on).
So…does anyone else out there have an experience or observation that compares to this? Let me know!
As I said, behavior intrigues me.