interviewing situations.
When you were selecting positions for a disciplinary interview, the chances are that you placed yourself at the opposite end of the table from the person you were to reprimand. It is probably natural to want to distance oneself from what is likely to be an unpleasant task. It may, however, be that the diagonal seating arrangement used for other kinds of interviews may take some of the edge off the situation. Look at the exercise again and try to visualize the interaction that would take place in each possible combination of seats. You should feel that the diagonal arrangement offers the best compromise between the overly formal and the too casual. If you do not feel this way at the moment, perhaps you will change your mind when you have read through the rest of the chapter.
Seating arrangements
Where people choose to sit in the various situations in which they find themselves reveals certain predictable patterns of behaviour. But where they choose to sit may not always be the best position for them to achieve what they wish to achieve. For instance, a lecture room will tend to fill up from the back forwards. Yet, people have presumably gone along to hear what someone has to say: it would, surely, be better to occupy a seat at the front rather than the back.
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Similarly, many people adopt absurdly formal seating arrange ments for interviews - arrangements that can be shown to inhibit rather than encourage the very thing that is supposed to take place, that is, the fullest and freest possible exchange of information and views. Individuals who go into bars and other social settings in the hope of meeting someone they can talk to will often seek a seat in a corner or in some other position from which they can observe. These are not, however, positions that others are likely to be drawn to - far better to place oneself boldly in the centre of movement and activity: most likely a seat at the counter in a bar or at a table near the counter if those seats are all occupied.
Albert Mehrabian, whose work we have encountered before, made some interesting suggestions for those who find themselves alone in a public place, perhaps in a strange city, and who wish to leave the possibility of talking to someone else open. Fairly obviously, sitting with your back to other people present will tend to preclude such a possibility. Sitting facing may well be a little daunting, not only for the person taking up such a position, but also for the people already there. Sitting at an angle offers a good compromise. It prevents too much initial closeness and it does offer the chance of joining in a conversation at a later stage if this becomes appropriate. In fact Mehrabian suggested a zig zag design for bar and cafeteria tables and counters, which he feels would encourage such increased contacts (see Figure 6.3). As you can see, this provides a very flexible arrangement in which groups of people can converse, while at the same time leaving it open for people to keep themselves to themselves if they wish. If the seats are on swivels, this increases the flexibility of the arrangement.
In a cafeteria of the traditional design with square or slightly oblong tables, an 'adjacent sides at right angles' arrangement is favoured by people who wish to talk to each other. People who do not wish to talk tend to sit opposite one another if the tables are square. If the tables are oblong, and where there are, say, two seats at either side of the table and one at each end (as in the exercise you did earlier), people who wish to talk will sit either directly opposite each other or diagonally across the corner at one end. People who do not wish to talk will sit either at the ends or diagonally opposite each other on each side.
figure 6 . 3 m ehrabi a n ' s zi g-zag design for cafe te ria tabl e s
As we saw in the exercise, those whose relationship with each other is competitive will tend to sit facing each other. Those whose relationship or task is a cooperative one will tend to sit side by side. Not only are these positions naturally taken up by most people in such situations, they can be used to encourage the kind of behaviour desired. That is to say, if you place people opposite each other they will tend to compete: if you place them side by side, they will be much more likely to cooperate. This finding has useful implications for deciding seating arrangements at places of work and in meetings and conferences. It is interesting to speculate on what the effect might be in, say, industrial negotiations if a seating arrangement other than the traditional across-the-table one were to be used. It is also fairly clear that King Arthur's round table, giving equality to all the participants, anticipated some of the recent research into non-verbal communication.
In interviews, the positions which are characteristically taken up are not always the best available. As we saw earlier, for disciplinary interviews, people will tend to sit opposite each other and as far away as the size of the table will permit. There are still many people who will adopt the same positions in other kinds of interviews, such as job selection, counselling and performance appraisal. Yet the research that has been done suggests that, since the purpose of most interviews is to obtain or give information and opinions, the diagonal position at the comer of a table is preferable when there are only two people - interviewer and interviewee - involved. Generally speaking, it is better to have an informal setting than a formal one. Sitting in comfortable chairs with a low table leads to the exchange of more information than the kind of formal setting in which the interviewers sit along a sort of 'top table' and the interviewee sits at a separate small table in front of it.
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Why do psychiatrists have couches?
Orientation is usually defined as the degree of the angle between a line joining one person to another and the direction in which the person under consideration is facing. Thus, when two people are facing each other directly, this is 0°. It has been found that the further apart two people are, the more likely it is that the angle of orientation will be 0°.Orientation may also be symmetrical or asymmetrical. A symmetrical one means the people involved are face to face, back to back, or their angles of orientation are the same (that is, both are, say, a third or a half tum away from each other). An asymmetrical orientation is one in which the angles are different, as when one person is facing directly, but the other is half-turned away. Asymmetrical orientations permit closer proximity than those which are symmetrical, especially when both are facing. Back-to-back orientations make communication difficult because, even though verbal messages may still be understood, the fact of not being able to observe each other's body language means a large part of the total message has been removed. Mehrabian has calculated from his own researches that as much as 93 % of the message in a face-to-face encounter is non-verbal, leaving only 7% for the verbal (we shall return to this point in Chapter 1 1 ). Orientation can be horizontal or it can be vertical. In the horizontal plane the main concern is whether the orientation is facing or not. In the vertical plane, the interest is in whether the person concerned is higher up or lower down than another. Being higher up than another person, or even simply being taller, significantly affects the interaction which takes place.
People behave differently when lying down than when standing up. People lying down tend to remember more, generally. Memory recall is a negatively accelerated function of time, that is to say, more is recalled in the first few minutes. People will be more imaginative and reflective when lying down, but less receptive to action. When standing, thought tends to result more readily in action, but is less responsive to new suggestions and to close examination of a topic. Decisions are made faster and more strongly when standing. This may account for the suggestion made by at least one authority on management techniques that daily action conferences by managers should be taken standing, up rather than the more normal sitting round a table. And the findings about how people remember more and are more reflective when lying down may have some bearing on the answer to the question with which we started this section.