How to people-watch

Words by Joe Fidler

People-watching is a term thrown around with reckless abandon. Used to romanticise the act of blankly observing the strangers around you in a public space for want of something to do. To that I say: have some fucking decorum you listless fucks. People-watching is serious business and if you aren’t bringing the right epistemology, you could very well be anti-social.

Birdwatching and plane spotting respected niches. Birdwatching, and more broadly nature watching, sees this observational hobby method. Trainspotting has even transcended its niche in no small part to the eccentric yet pure internet personality that is Francis Bourgeois. Not to mention, Irvine Welsh’s loosely related heroin literary epic of the same name. So, if birds and trains seem like an obvious question, and interesting.

The knowledge hunt

Naturally I tried joining a peoplewatcher’s Facebook group, the best place to really get stuck into a subculture. ‘People Watching in a Crazy World’ is a Facebook group with 1.2k members. The page is vague commentary on the failings of modern men. Its description reads, “this group is about those watch people and what they do and then worry that what we are watching is normal..............Scream.” My application fell through to my great disappointment, and with no discerning questionnaire I was left hurt. My internet ogling would have to settle for the people-watching WikiHow page to see if there were any well-blooded people-watchers willing to part with their hard-stared wisdom. Turns out there are rules, which I’ll abridge.

Be purposeful in choosing a people-watching spot. If you want home. If you wish to observe absolute anarchy, try George Street McDonalds past midnight. Note your demographic and make sure people will be there.

You also need to be unobtrusive. and wear your most uninteresting clothes. Balconies and rooftops are recommended.

Take Notes and set time goals too, this will help make the practice purposeful even if it may seem goalless and/or purposeless. prompt for creativity. However, make sure to do so discreetly. The candidness of your subjects is essential.

Lastly, try not to pass judgement on your subjects. This tip struck me as the most bizarre. The psychological kick one gets out of judgement (or rather prejudgment) is for many, the whole point of observing strangers with no consequence. This bit of advice, though a little misleading, rather encourages an awareness of judgement. While judgement is part of the process, allowing negative prejudgement of a person’s character to enter your practice will damage your bias and just put you in a shit mood. As ‘Hannah’ from WikiHow puts it: “Everyone has bad days”.

Yet judgement is so very human.

We’re hardwired to make complex critical judgements of a person from the tiniest of tells which you might not even be conscious of yourself. This is done through the brain’s person perception network

In pursuit of an academic leg to stand on, I discovered ‘The neuroscience of people watching: How the human brain makes sense of other people’s encounters’, a research paper in the Annals of The New York Academy of Sciences, published in 2017 by Susanne

According to this paper, our ability to judge, that is, turn perception into interpretation socially, is believed by some to be key in our evolution into the self-obsessed, polluting, geniuses we are today. In the science world, people-watching is known as a third person encounter (TPE) — when the subject does not know they are being observed. TPEs, though kind of creepy, are critical in data from the subject unimpeded by the awareness found in a second person encounter — face to face observation.

Practice

My original plan was to go through all the aforementioned motions and formalities. However, while trapped at home with a bout of COVID and staring at the young and free souls of Crown Street, I realised to my horror, that I was peoplewatching:

It was December 11 and I started people-watching in earnest at 5:50. It was 28 degrees and the air smelled of an imminent storm.

Despite formally renouncing any judgement of character, it creeped in anyway through the back door