Assignment #7 - Nonobvious Observations

There are many different nonobvious things you are able to obverse about a person. For example, even without seeing the person, you will be able to tell a lot about the person from their posture. For example, are they looking up, down, or straight ahead? Are they walking fast or kind of shuffling around? There are also physical things you should be able to tell about the person. You should be able to tell how tall the person is compared to other people. You will be able to see hands in our videos, so looking at the size and appearance of the hands should also help you narrow down gender.

Outside of the actual person, you will see many nonobvious things based on the people around them and how these people treat the person. Since it was a requirement that we interact with others in the assignment, you will be able to gauge things about the person based on how they are treated. My team went to a bar, ordered a drink, and played a round of 42. In the bar environment, men and women are often treated differently by the bartenders and the other people in the bar. Based on how the bartender acted when the person went to order a drink could be a good indicator of gender. The type of drink ordered may also be a good indicator. If you know enough about the people on the team to know what they like, it would be really easy to deduce who is who. 

Since the game 42 is a partner based game of two teams, there are many different observations you could make. How does the person work interact with the people around them? Are they very outgoing and talkative or are they shy and introverted? Are they interacting with one person more than the others? Maybe if they are only focused on their partner or interacting negatively, then they are highly competitive. If they are just throwing random tiles out, then they might not care if they win or maybe they just do not know how to play. 

Obviously, these are just a few of the things that could be observed. Once you start looking at the whole situation from a variety of ways and letting your mind observe things you don’t initially think are important, you will be surprised at how much you can tell about a person. The readings, which focused on how words normally considered insignificant can be used to tell us things about people, were a good way to get our minds going.

As a side note on the readings, I really didn’t like either. The paper was extremely long and dense. It was mostly horrible to read. The book on the other hand was really easy to read, but it was too conversational for me. His writing style made me feel like I wasn’t going to learn anything significant from him. They did do a good job making me thing though, so I guess they did their job.