The psychology behind seating plans.

Walking into class to see a new seating plan up on the board may be the worst fear of most students. Although the dreaded seating plan brings a frown to most faces, having a designated seat provides comfort and a sense of familiarity to our minds. Have you ever walked into a classroom and drifted towards “your usual spot” without even thinking? Do you take the same seats even when your class doesn’t have a seating plan? This unique human behaviour pattern is an example of “territoriality”.

Picking the same seats repeatedly allows humans to set up a temporary territory, which provides our minds with something familiar and secure that we automatically come back to over and over. Humans typically look for safe and comfortable situations, which impacts our seating choices as we tend to find our own secure and familiar place that we return to as we subconsciously recognise it as a safe place. This is due to evolutionary reasons, as overtime humans have evolved to trust familiar situations that they know are safe. In addition to this, humans are naturally habit forming as our repeated behaviour becomes imprinted into our neural pathways after only being completed a few times in a row. This shows why, even when a seating plan is altered or removed completely, students tend to settle back into their set seats as we instinctively repeat habits in order to feel comfortable and safe.

Assigned or not assigned, seating plans will almost always form by the pure nature of human behaviour. Seating patterns provide humans with comfort and familiarity, which helps our subconscious feel safe in the classroom. This allows people to feel calm wherever they are as having something repetivive and familiar can provide a sense of comfort and safety wherever you go.

Next time you walk into class and feel the dreaded feeling of having a new seating plan, think about the new behavioural habits forming in your head as you drag yourself hesitantly over to the seat you will always subconsciously remember as “your usual spot”.

Annabel B, Year 8