Mid 20th C. Etiquette and Chivalry

Some men report finding it hard to concentrate on their papers, what with all the female straphangers above them grumbling about the “Death of Chivalry.” 

Some rules about etiquette don’t last...

From “Male Polish,” 1961

To hear some women tell it, we are now deep in a recession in manners. If you’ve been to New York recently, you may have noticed they particularly tell it in buses and subways. Some men, in fact, report finding it hard to concentrate on their papers, what with all the female straphangers above them grumbling about the “Death of Chivalry.” 

HAS CYCLES: Etiquette, like business, has cycles. Whenever there is a slump, it's pretty certain some excess preceded it. And 50 years ago etiquette had excesses aplenty. Take this rule in a Victorian etiquette book: “When a gentleman offers a lady his chair, he should engage her in conversation for a few minutes, thus giving the seat time to cool.” Presumably this would save the lady the trouble of using her fan. But hot seats are not considered a problem today. What bothers a modern man is whether to give up his seat, period. 

Etiquette takes a practical view of the matter: In public conveyances men should relinquish their seats for pregnant women, women burdened with children or bundles, old and infirm women but not for every frisky young thing who climbs aboard. In a social setting, the better part of polish is to offer your seat to any standing female, whether she just won the Olympics or not. 

OPENING DOORS Even more sticky is the problem of when to open a woman’s door. Writes S.J.: “Sure, a man ought to practice etiquette, and I believe most men would, if women would only let them. Take the rule about opening doors. Nine times out of 10, just when a man starts to open a door for a woman, she grabs the knob and opens it herself, as if to say, ‘Look, Buster, who needs YOU?’” 

Etiquette indeed specifies that men should open doors for women. But whenever one persists in opening her own, all you can do. obviously, is let her. You should not make a thing of it. S.J. also has a peeve against doors that push in rather than open out. “Here you are.” he said, “standing at the still, trying to hold a push-door in front of you, so your date can enter the room first. To do so, she has to duck under your arm, and what started out to be a helping hand ends up resembling the minuet or London Bridge.” 

RULES CLASH Here is a case of two rules clashing one about opening doors, the other about “ladies first.” In this instance “ladies first” is sacrificed. Coming to a push-door, the man correctly precedes the woman through the door in order to hold it for her. In the event she pushes ahead, he has only to extend his arm over her head to take the door's weight from her as she passes through. – Don Goodwin, Copyright 1961

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia 

Etiquette at the Door

A Question of Etiquette: Do you hold the door for others?

Do “everyday acts of etiquette, such as holding doors for other people, reflect the internal simulation of acts of social cooperation?”

American researchers stake out a door and find it far from an open and shut case

Whether one person holds a door open for another is not simply a question of etiquette, says a study by Joseph P Santamaria and David A Rosenbaum of Pennsylvania State University. No, they say. Nothing simple about it.

Santamaria and Rosenbaum worked to pursue the answer through a tangle of belief, logic, probability, perception and calculation. Their study, Etiquette and Effort: Holding Doors for Others, was published in 2011 in the journal Psychological Science. It is, one way or another, a gripping read.

Santamaria and Rosenbaum selected a door that gets heavy use by people entering or exiting a building. “We recorded the behaviour of 148 individuals approaching and passing through the door. We determined whether the first person held the door for the follower or followers, how far the follower or followers were from the door, how long it took for the follower or followers to reach the doorway, and how many followers (one or two) followed the first person at the door.”

“We found,” they reveal, “that the closer the follower or followers were to the door, the more likely people were to hold the door open.” The researchers devised the experiment to test their new hypothesis — their highly educated guess — as to what happens in the mind of a person faced with a decision to either hold the door open for the next person, or not hold the door open.

“Specifically, we hypothesised that decisions about whether to hold a door open depend on calculations of the odds that one person’s holding the door would require less effort than would each individual’s opening the door on his or her own.”

Santamaria and Rosenbaum’s small, specific door-holding hypothesis is a toy version of their big, general hypothesis: “We hypothesised that everyday acts of etiquette, such as holding doors for other people, reflect the internal simulation of acts of social cooperation.” Their theory aims for a deep level of understanding: “According to [our] view, etiquette, or the form of physically expressed etiquette considered here, is not just a symbol for respect; it is also a means of reducing physical effort for the group.”

In the final paragraph, the study points out one of its obvious limitations: “Some forms of etiquette do not concern physical effort (eg napkin folding).”

The Santamaria/Rosenbaum study follows distantly in the tradition of John Trinkaus. Professor Trinkaus published nearly 100 academic studies about things that annoyed him. His paper, called Exiting a Building: An Informal Look, published in 1990, reported the behaviour of 819 people leaving a New York City building that had two side-by-side doors, one held in the open position, the other closed. Trinkaus observed that approximately 70% of those people chose to exit through the open door.

Marc Abrahams is editor of the Annals of ImprobableResearch and organiser of the Ig Nobel prizes - From May 2015, TheGuardian.com

🍽️Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia