Most people lead a comfortable 9-5 life. You go to work, work away, go home, sometimes seeing friends or engaging in extracurriculars. Even so, sometimes you find yourself in unusual social situations, situations where a first-timer wouldn’t know how to behave. Here are some normal situations with abnormal social norms.

• Flights: On a 12-hour flight, you find a cross section of the population bored, tired and without Internet. In this willpower-reduced state, snobs dress in sweatpants and workaholics watch thrashy feel-good movies. A surprising number of people try napping¹, while others strike up conversations with strangers.
• Dates: It’s common for people taking steps to get to know new people, for example by attending local meet-ups; however, friend-seekers rarely try getting to know others well. Dates are among the few situations where people deliberately try building deep connections. Think about it: the purpose of a date is for two people, usually strangers, to become romantic partners. Pretty remarkable, right? Even more remarkable is that it sometimes works.
• Alcohol: Alcohol creates a form of social anarchy. Moderately tipsy people are amusing – they’re a bit like children, candid and ignorant of social norms, though they enjoy discussing grown-up topics.
• Work interviews: A work interview is nothing at all like an ordinary conversation, despite appearances; it’s like an improv play where the interviewee tries selling themself and the interviewer maintains a poker face. The interviewee presents themself as the ideal employee: competent, reliable and a good coffee machine conversationalist².
• Music festivals: During music festivals, thousands of sweaty people packed like sardines scream in unison while jumping up and down. Though they’re strangers, they share a sense of camaraderie, sometimes even sharing food and belongings³. Cult?
• Summer camps: There are summer camps for kids as well as adults, though the latter are sometimes called ‘retreats’ or ‘get-aways’. The goal of most summer camps is for a group of strangers to pursue a common interest together and make new friends. Being in a remote place helps create a space for intimacy: the camp participants tacitly agree that ‘what gets said here stays here’.
• Military service: Life in the military is famously totalitarian: it’s all about obeying your superiors. And if you do mandatory military service, you’re normally at the bottom of the pecking order. In no other setting is there such a clear hierarchy, and in no other setting is outright bullying socially acceptable.

These are all time-bound activities disconnected from everyday life, usually physically or by means of clothing, with extraordinary social norms. This makes them good settings for people-watching. Why study ‘man in a state of nature’ – an impossibility anyway – if you can study ‘man in a state of society’?