The environment around humans is directly related to their psychology and social behavior. Various behavioral changes are noticed when we change the environment of a particular place, room, clinic, waiting room, etc. Changing seating arrangements from socio-petal and socio-fugal to mixed arrangements where patients arrange seating themselves exerts a significant effect on their behavior. There are countless variations in their orientation. The psychological effect changes the social behavior and the effect-causing reasons are many including socio-petal and socio-fugal arrangement, population density, crowd, social support, etc.
In general socio-petal arrangement can be termed as people sitting face to face and Socio-fugal as people sitting back to back. In the socio-fugal arrangement, the subject’s faces point to opposite directions and their shoulders are at right angles to each other. They have to completely turn their face clockwise or anti-clockwise in order to see each other. The difference in social behavior varies from person to person along with certain other factors like population density, crowd, etc. Reserved kinds of persons prefer socio-fugal arrangements. Those who mix up easily with others and of a happy, cheerful nature prefer socio-fugal arrangements. The effects also vary according to gender (male and female). Social support is expected and easily noticed in socio-petal arrangements due to increased interaction beginning from eye contact. The opposite person can also directly see the person seated right in front of and facing towards him and conclude whether he needs any physical or verbal support or not. Practically it depends upon his own social behavior and nature.
Opposite sex persons also show different social behavior according to the seating arrangement. The seating arrangement can increase as well as decrease from person to person. Opposite genders usually interact more in socio-petal arrangements particularly if they are of the same age group. The socio-fugal pattern decreases the interaction between people and thus the feeling of comfort also decreases. Population density too has controversial effects on behavioral changes in people depending upon various factors like age group, gender, geographical and demographical location of the place, and even religion. Jews are more helpful towards each other than other people at a particular place.
The people who are born and brought up in densely populated areas (comparatively more number of people in a particular locality or area than normal or usual) may show variable social behavior (way of interacting with other people) in a changing environment. But most of them feel comfortable in crowded (more than the required number of people at a particular place where physical movement slows down due to crowd) places. Rarely, some persons from densely populated areas show peculiar behavior. They hate crowds and try to remain alone and aloof in the least populated places. This is perhaps due to a lack of required attention when they were brought up in and around crowded places which leads to the development of hatred towards the crowd.
Social support(verbal and/or physical, emotional help offered unconditionally by people to help the needy and boost up the morale of other people) increases in the socio-petal arrangement. In the case of single-gender(male or female only) places or clinics, preference should be given to socio-petal arrangements. In places where a single common facility exists for both males and females, the socio-fugal arrangement is preferable.
In the case of infants, children, kids, neither of these arrangements should be preferred. A mixed arrangement is preferable here. Sets of two or three chairs (preferably two) seats should be there having some empty space inbetween for a litle movement. In case of senior citizens(old aged),either socio-petal or mixed arrangement should be preferred. Socio-fugal arrangement exerts negative pressure on aged people. Old aged persons often have similar life experiences and even many age related common problems. They feel relaxed after looking, expressing and interacting with others of their age group.
Bibliography
Jaswant and Ron: The sofas (Singh Brothers,Ldh.,1998_2003).
Rathore,S.S.: Soothing Seats (Oriental Press,Chd.2000_2007).
Mabel,Romy: Environmental Psychology (Kapoor and Sons,2006).