See you there

Abstract

A few years ago I was lucky enough to spend a few days on the Big Island of Hawaii. Fortunately, it was part of a holiday rather than a work-related visit, so when I decided to spend a lot of the time on trails in Volcanoes National Park, I had none of the residual guilt usually associated with skipping sessions at a meeting I was supposed to be attending. Actually that whole issue of “meetings psychology” is an interesting one. There are probably entire academic departments devoted to it somewhere. They probably hold annual meetings in nice places where timetabled sessions oscillate between two stable states: auditoriums filled to bursting with academics who are noticeably more paranoid than usual, convinced that everyone is watching them. And auditoriums which are completely empty. You can imagine the conversations in the white-water-rafting ticket queue: “Hello Fred, good to see you. Having a day off?” “No, no, not at all. Following our recent major grant; you know about that?—‘The effects of intermittent relaxation on factual retention and creativity in loosely hierarchical organisational structures’—I’m actually obliged to spend at least 2 days per meeting engaging in fieldwork—as now in fact. Anyway, I was going to speak to you at the session yesterday, but you weren’t there were you?” “Yes, yes, I was there. Actually I was sitting right behind you.” “Oh right. So what’s new?” “Well we’ve got a big new grant too. I’m really pleased about it because I didn’t think it would get through—‘The effects of observation on factual retention, creativity, and relaxational behaviour in principal investigators’.” “Oh right…right…” In my purely anecdotal experience, people vary enormously both in their susceptibility to extraneous temptations and in their tendency to feeling guilty about having succumbed. At one extreme, there are those who feel so guilty about sneaking out that they will sit through days or even entire weeks of meetings with gritted teeth, trying desperately to extract satisfaction from their puritanical sense of goodness, but generally giving the game away by a default state of grumpiness, lightened only by occasional bursts of good humour when news filters through that a torrential downpour has caused a white-water raft to overturn and, as night falls, its occupants are stranded at assorted locations several miles downstream. (Actually, this isn’t quite the extreme: the real extremes are those who sit through an entire week of a meeting and genuinely enjoy it. But these individuals are quite rare, and anyway, are probably beyond psychology). At the other extreme, are the people who you didn’t even know were at the meeting—basically because they weren’t. Of course, most of us fall somewhere in between and our behaviour on any given occasion is quite sensitive to factors such as meeting content, company, and location. In places like Belgrade, everyone’s at the meeting, usually huddled round the podium for safety in numbers and to avoid eye contact with the armed guard stationed at the exit to prevent them leaving. But in places like Hawaii, even small lecture theatres suddenly become airy expanses, sparsely populated by an elite audience. And that squeaking noise isn’t the projector malfunctioning, it’s the sound of teeth grinding.