You are Territorial, and you Know it

Have you noticed a case where you are at the parking lot and you see a car about to leave but then you decide to pick the spot where the car is about to leave only to realize that the person driving the car keeps you waiting for a while. You begin to ask why it kept so long for the car to leave even when it was about to leave before you got there?

The answer to the question above is that humans like to feel the ownership of a particular thing including car space. Have you not seen that when you want to park your car in a public place, you tend to have a feeling like you own one space there especially when you are parking your car there on a daily basis even when they are not yours. Scientist have referred to this as just being human territoriality.

image:pxhere

Scientists went on to investigate the parking lot issue and they took data of 200 people from when they got into their cars to when they left for a different person who was waiting for them to leave and it was seen that on a average people spend 6.88 seconds longer that they would do compared to when people are not waiting. All total departure time in the study was under 2 minutes but some people would spend up to 10 seconds delaying before leaving the lot.

It is then funny how people who are expecting those leaving will wait so they can park at their spot. Study also shows that honking would not help as people spend more time than normal when they are honked at with the average being 11.95 seconds. It now becomes funny to see that people who drive fancy cars are able to get male drivers to leave their parking spot sooner than normal up to about 9.33 seconds.

Image; Picryl

Back in the 1980s when payphone was a thing, researchers at the time saw that people tend to use the payphone longer than normal when they know a person is waiting to use the phone after them. The study showed that people spent 3 minutes more when there is a person waiting to use the payphone at the time, and the time became longer when they notice that there is more than one person waiting.

This territorial attitude also happens at workplaces. Unless a person would be compensated for sharing knowledge that would make them have better scores and performance index than their colleagues, they would prefer to keep it to themselves. They behave in this territorial way because they want to guide what is precious to them.

With human territorial attitude, during primary territory the possession is truly theirs but then humans take it far with secondary territories where we have temporary rights over something that isn't theirs but they have temporary possessions of them. There are possibility transferring primary territories to secondary territories such as in the case of making a statement to a police that someone crossed into your lane while driving on the road. Although the road isn't primarily yours, the fact that you are on the road with your car can lead to transferred territories from primary to secondary.

Image; picryl

Researchers in Virginia did a live experiment where they sat on a seat when the previous person who sat there went to the toilet, and they recorded that the people requested for their seat when they came back from the rest room even when the chair was primarily for the library meaning it was secondary territory playing out there because the library was a public space. The researchers came to a conclusion that the people who came back to claim territory over the seats did so because of how valuable the seats were.

Let me say this to you; When next you see someone claiming to own something that is of secondary territory, just remember that we are a territorial species and what we are defending is of value.

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Reference

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