How to people-watch

People-watching is serious business and if you aren’t bringing the right epistemology, you could very well be anti-social.

Image Credit: Bonnie Huang

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 are both well fleshed out and respected niches. Birdwatching, and more broadly nature watching, sees this observational hobby combine with the scientific 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 are so great, why not people? It may seem like an obvious question, and I am guilty of oversimplification, but it is this complexity that I find so interesting.

The knowledge hunt

Naturally I tried joining a people-watcher’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 fronted by a cartoon offering some vague commentary on the failings of modern men. Its description reads, “this group is about those of us who find it interesting to 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 feeling mystified and personally 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 to watch seniors? Go to a retirement 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. This means find a spot out of the way 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. Observation of people is an effective 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 Quadflieg and Kami Koldewyn. 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 the study of psychology as they offer 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 people-watching:

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 of my mind. The Street felt rich with symbolism: The ‘ironic’ Salomon hiking shoes, the panicky late for my bus power-walk, a woman’s icy stride in front of her assumed partner suggesting that things are tense but not tense enough to cancel plans. Most people seemed to drift from bars, cafes, and restaurants in impenetrable groups. My third storey point-of-view gave me something close to invisibility. While it feels perfectly acceptable to stare at strangers, especially if they can’t see you, I found myself spotting multiple people I knew, and for some reason only then did I feel uncomfortable. Watching someone who you’d otherwise say hi to and make small talk with from your bedroom with COVID, all the while sweating profusely, is a position I’d only put myself in for the good of people-watching.

Pensive musings

When you watch birds and planes, they can’t look at you back, at least not in the same way a human being can. The social complexity and even the uncomfortability may very well be why people watching remains relatively unexplored. 

Although we notice all these little things about a person when we first lay eyes on them, we often feel ashamed of it, but we cannot hide from this innately human trait. It seems tragically cliché, but watching people is also a way of watching yourself. If we question our biases, judgement, and critical thinking, it makes us feel challenged. People-watching with intention and not simply indulging feels less like reality TV and more like a thought-provoking documentary on the real Crown Street, hosted by Louis Theroux. I don’t expect everyone to go through all the tedious formalities, because I certainly didn’t. It’s not even that bad as a time-wasting activity. But just a bit of mindfulness makes the experience all the more wholesome. So go forth budding people-watchers and watch wholesomely!