Icelanders Are Sociopathic

I was picking up a friend from Keflavík airport recently and had a classic demonstration of Icelandic behaviour.

The arrivals space in the lovely 'Kef' is now fairly typical of the genre, if somewhat smaller: there's a large sliding door where the arriving passengers emerge, a ribbon-barriered broad walkway down which they walk while they squint and scan the crowd for their loved ones, and an open space in front of that where said loved ones wait. This open space would probably hold around five hundred people rock-concert style, or comfortably around fifty Japanese or English people if their personal space rules were to be not infringed.

I got there very early and stood somewhere just forward of off-centre in the open space. There were five or ten other people there: most of them lingering towards the front, a few at the front corners and the remainder randomly scattered.

Here's a crappy picture that neatly illustrates the point:

So there I stood, patiently waiting and doing what any good nerd does these days: checking my Twitter feeds and reading The Grauniad on my smartphone. All in the world was good. My plan to get there early and chill out was working just fine.

People started to fill the space, until most of the space was taken up and there were obvious walkways in between the human obstructions. Here's a picture no less crappy than the previous one that shows this:

The inevitable then happened: people starting using the walkway directly in front of me and I was being treated as the human equivalent of a wall: something to graze or bump off. I was standing as you'd expect someone to stand using a smartphone: holding the phone around sternum level with one hand, whilst gently caressing it -er, sorry: scrolling- with the other hand. This meant that the phone was sticking out maybe ten centimetres from my body.

This was clearly too much for Siggi and his pals to handle. As they were walking past me, my finely-tuned proximity alarms were going off like mad and warning me of impending collisions, of people walking straight at me and that if I didn't get out of the way a collision would happen. A couple of years' living in London taught me the gentle give-and-take dance that the people in cities in real countries develop, that Brownian motion of being in close proximity whilst not invading other people's space. The people coming past me were walking straight through the space occupied by my phone. They were clipping it with their arms and nearly knocking it out of my hand. I found I had to hold tightly on to it for fear that I would actually lose grip.

I decided to carry out a small experiment and see what would happen if I fought the Brownian motion instinct and just stood my ground. The bumping got worse.

Then, a glorious thing happened. The actions of one man demonstrated so clearly the collective instinct of the Icelanders when it comes to thoughtfulness, consideration for other people and social awareness.

A man wearing worn-out sports clothing, scruffy black sneakers, a cheap gold necklace and unwashed hair stood directly in front of me, with his woman at his side. See picture.

The distance from the front edge of my phone to the centre of his back was round ten centimetres. Unlike many of my anecdotes, this is absolutely true.

So not only was Captain Cretin completely blocking my view, he was also seriously invading my personal space. He'd obviously planted himself there because he wanted a clear view of the arriving travellers and it didn't even occur to him to that he might have been blocking someone's view.

The proximity alarms in my head were now screaming: 'Ah-ROO-GAA!... Ah-ROOOOO-GAA!!!'.

But, no. I stubbornly stayed where I was and made the sacrifice of my comfort for the sake of social science. I decided it would be interesting to see what Captain Cretin would do next.

He surpassed himself. He was so keen to get a good look at the arriving people that he was bobbing and weaving a lot to get a better view. A quick glance confirmed why he needed to do this: yet another peasant farmer had planted himself right in front and blocked his view.

In the course of his bobbing he actually backed into me. Several times.

In a country where social history is measured in units larger than nanoseconds this would have been the offense that prompted gushing apologies and made him realise that he was standing way too close to me. But, no. Our superhero did nothing whatsoever. It clearly didn't even register with him and that's the interesting point: he saw nothing wrong whatsoever with what he was doing. To him it was perfectly normal behaviour. He wasn't trying to to be rude, boorish or ignorant; he was just standing waiting for someone. If he'd wanted to be rude, he would have done something rude by his standards, like the fart-cup-sniff-assess trick, or spitting on the floor. Or far, far worse: pulled out a handkerchief, loudly blown his nose, examined the product and put the handkerchief back in his pocket.

A quick skim of the interwebs turned up this interesting information about sociopathy. It tells us that what used to be called Sociopathy is defined as:

 "...a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood."

...which means that according to this definition, Icelanders are Sociopathic.

Footnote:

How can I be so generalised? Well, I've lived here long enough to know that this is typical behaviour, not just for white trash and didn't-learn-it-in-school seventy year old taxi drivers, but typical behaviour even for apparently civilised people in business suits.

This may actually be a more accurate definition, giving us the following:

"Anti-social behaviour is behaviour that lacks consideration for others and that may cause damage to society, whether intentionally or through negligence, as opposed to pro-social behaviour, behaviour that helps or benefits society."

...but the effect is the same, methinks.