Journalism

NEW STATESMAN BLOG 2

I am 40 next July and as part of my burgeoning mid-life crisis, I am attempting to lose my beer gut by then. So itÂ’s down to the Health Club six days a week. IÂ’ve lost over a stone since September, so itÂ’s been good for me to have an un-unhealthy obsession for once.
ThereÂ’s a 20 metre pool at the club, which is generally divided into three lanes, based on self-assessed ability: slow, medium or fast. I have found it very interesting, slightly frustrating and quite illuminating about human nature as to which lane people choose to go in. It also says a lot about my slightly pedantic and obsessive nature that this is something that bothers me.
Now if I get to the pool I will choose my lanes by two criteria. If the lanes have a fairly equal number of people in them I will briefly assess the average speed of all the swimmers and choose the lane (usually the medium) that I think my speed best fits into. But if the lanes have an unequal number of swimmers in them, as long as none of them are too full, I will tend to go into the least busy lane (though not the fast lane if there are more than two swimmers in there already as I would hold them up).
I believe this is the correct way to behave. I will even change lanes based upon the above rules if the number of people in the lanes varies over the half hour I am in the pool.
However, most other people are not as sensible or as concerned or as border-line autistic as me and seem to have decided which lane they belong in and go in that one regardless of how many people are already in that lane or of their average speed. Generally people will tend toward the medium lane and often there will be six people swimming top to tail in there, whilst there are only one or two in the slow and fast lanes.
It seems people care more about the way they are perceived and how they perceive themselves, than about having a comfortable swim. They wonÂ’t go into the slow lane, because that would imply they were weak and they wonÂ’t go into the fast lane as they donÂ’t want to seem to be claiming that they are above average, so the great mass of humanity congregate in the medium lane, where they are making the statement that they are neither competing with the alpha-swimmers, nor seeing themselves as the tardy and old swimmers who will be snapped up by any sharks that chance into the Holmes Place pool. But moving to the slow lane because it is empty does not make you weak. On the contrary, it makes you strong. And intelligent. Like me.
I find this inclination to the median both infuriating and insane. Especially given that many people who might consider themselves as moderate swimmers are in many circumstances either too slow or fast for the middle lane, but they won’t move. I want to shout at them, “Look, judge yourself by the speed of your fellow swimmers, if you moved to the slow lane and old speedy there moved to the fast then each lane would have the correct number of swimmers in it. Why don’t you move? Is being average and unremarkable so important to you?”
I think this phenomenon tells us a lot about human nature outside of the swimming pool and think it deserves scientific studies that take months to conclude the completely bloody obvious. I have already given it a name – the Herring Effect. It works on two levels.