People-watching

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Customers looking out from a Parisian cafe Cafe Life, Paris.jpg
Customers looking out from a Parisian café

People-watching or crowd watching is the act of observing people and their interactions in public. [1] [2] It involves picking up on idiosyncrasies to try to interpret or guess at another person's story, interactions, and relationships with the limited details they have. [3] This includes speech in action, relationship interactions, body language, expressions, clothing, activities and crowd behaviours. Eavesdropping may accompany the activity, as documented by the humor blog Overheard in New York , though is not required. [4]

People-watching is distinguished from naturalistic observation, a process used for scientific purposes, compared to people-watching as a casual activity, used for relaxation or inspiration for characters or characters' mannerisms in their own creative works. [5] It can also be distinguished from street photography; while the street photographer necessarily undertakes a form of people-watching, they do so for the purpose of composing photographs for artistic and documentary purposes. [6]

See also

References

  1. Davis, Candace (September 6, 2014). "People Watching: Harmless or Perverted?". Huffington Post. Retrieved December 14, 2015.
  2. Burton, Tara Isabella (October 2015). "People-Watching in Paris". National Geographic. Retrieved December 14, 2015.
  3. Quadflieg, Susanne; Koldewyn, Kami (2017-04-12). "The neuroscience of people watching: how the human brain makes sense of other people's encounters". Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 1396 (1): 166–182. doi:10.1111/nyas.13331. hdl: 1983/1e73b5d8-848d-40e0-a5c1-80392dcfae20 . ISSN   0077-8923. PMID   28405964. S2CID   24422967.
  4. "People-Watching: Here’s Looking at You" New York Times 15 October 2006
  5. "How to Begin People Watching". eHow. Retrieved 3 November 2015.
  6. Coomes, Phil (4 October 2010). "Street photography now". BBC News . Retrieved 6 April 2016.