Don't take my seat, find your own!

So it's a few days into the quarter and by now you've established your seat. One morning you go to class, but find, to your annoyance, it's been taken. How dare they!

Although assigned seating arrangements probably ended during high school, many college students still feel a desire to sit in the same seat all quarter.

Perhaps it is because the need for regularity is deeply ingrained. Perhaps we're just used to assigned seats. Maybe change is bad. Whatever the reason, students instinctively set boundaries and when those boundaries are breached, bitterness ensues.

Freshman Teri Montgomery habitually sits in the same seat, always toward the back or wherever there are less people. Once she has claimed her territory, she dislikes seat-stealers.

"It makes me feel a little bit scatterbrained and I have to find a seat real fast and usually I'll try and get there faster the next day so they don't take it again," she said.

Montgomery said it's like a violation, "I like stuff to stay the same, and I don't like change a whole lot."

"I think we tend to sit in the same place habitually because we're creatures of habits, repetition. Sameness makes us feel comfortable and it's probably just that simple," suggested Judith Logan, a professor of English, who says she does the same thing at church.

Having observed the phenomenon for years as a teacher, Logan figures having the same people around makes students feel comfortable in an uncomfortable situation and when someone takes it, "there's kind of a dislocation like, 'Wait a minute! That's my spot!'"

Dr. Amani El-Alayli, professor of social psychology at Eastern, says classroom territory is a social norm - the accepted behavior.

"People don't like it when other people violate norms," she said, "so when you set that social rule, especially probably a few days after people are sitting in the same seat, it's like there's a negative reaction, the norm violator, the person who's going against the social rule. They're disrupting the setting."

El-Alayli said there are several theories to explain why people sit in the same seat, and become upset when someone else takes it. One theory is the first come, first serve rule. It's the "it's mine because I got to it first" mentality which gives a sense of ownership.

Another theory, she said, is that this social norm, like others, provides efficiency. "Sitting in the same [seat], you could even argue, is more efficient because you don't have to waste any time trying to figure out where you're going to sit, right? You don't have to worry about getting in someone else's space, you know? You always have your own designated space." Switching seats creates distractions and enhances "different stimuli that might be distracting."

El-Alayli says humans could have been bred to be more territorial.

"People who are the most territorial were more likely to survive because they didn't let people in who could've potentially hurt them," she said, "and, you know, kept them from surviving and passing on their genes." She added that taking someone's seat is considered an invasion of space.

With some people it might be the opposite of territoriality. It might be courtesy. "You might be someone in class who doesn't care where you sit, but somebody else you feel like they really want their seat and so you might sit in your same seat so you don't take someone else's," said El-Alayli.

The last possibility is simply predictability. Humans like to know what to expect. "When somebody goes against predicted behavior, like they break a norm, it makes us uncomfortable because then we feel like we can't predict that very well," she said.

So the next time you're in class and someone violates the social norm, observe the reaction, or better yet, try sitting in someone's seat and then see what happens.