81 cases, open-62 no-19(8M,14F)

gender: X-35M, 54F  Y-43M, 51F

distance: max-5m
EDITED!!!

reaction: basically no reaction

positive reaction needs to be specified

Most people will open the door for others.

Gender may influence the behavior of opening the door for others. But there is just a small number of samples, We can't say that for sure.

When the distance is below 4 meters, people are more liable to open the door for others. And different distances won't profoundly affect the behavior. While the proportion of people who open the door for others is smaller when the distance reaches 4 meters. (Just 1 out of 7 people)

People who open the door for others and who benefit from the nice offer tend to have no reaction. Sometimes even though one of them said thank you, the other one would't respond.

-specific circumstances(time, mood, the behavior or even appearance of person behind them, etc)

-values,manners

-social psychology

-find out the max distance by participant observation.  

-specify and standardize the reaction

-interview and code stuff

According to (Goffman, 1966); the exchange of words and glances between individuals in each other's presence is a very common social arrangement…which is a preclude to social interaction. An individual may give information through the linguistic means formally established in society for this purpose, namely, speech or recognized speech substitutes such as writing and pictorial signs or gestures. One speaks here of an individual sending messages to someone who receives them. But the individual may also give information expressively, through the incidental symptomatic significance of events associated with him. In this case one might say that he emits, exudes, or gives off information to someone who gleans it.

The information that an individual provides, whether he sends it or exudes it, may be embodied or disembodied. A frown, a spoken word, or a kick is a message that a sender conveys by means of his own current bodily activity, the transmission occurring only during the time that his body is present to sustain this activity.

When individuals come into one another's immediate presence in circumstances where no spoken communication is called for, they none the less inevitably engage one another in communication of a sort, for in all situations, significance is ascribed to certain matters that are not necessarily connected with particular verbal communications. These comprise bodily appearance and personal acts: dress, bearing, movement and position, sound level, physical gestures such as waving or saluting, facial decorations, and broad emotional expression.

 

+Author Affiliations

Etiquette, the customary code of polite behavior among members of a group, provides a means of conveying respect for others, but what is the basis for etiquette’s unwritten rules? Here we show that one form of etiquette, holding a door open for another person, reflects the door holder’s expectation that the person for whom he or she holds the door shares the belief that the total effort expended by the two of them will be less than the summed efforts of the two individuals acting on their own. Our observations extend recent work on effort reduction in motor control to the management of social interactions.

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/04/15/0956797611406444.abstract