You may not pay much attention to your daily lift ride. Many of us use a lift several times during the day without really thinking about it. But Lee Gray, PhD, of the University of North Carolina, the US, has made it his business to examine this overlooked form of public transport. He is known as the "Lift Guy". "The lift becomes this interesting social space where etiquette  is sort of odd ," Gray told the BBC. "They (Lifts) are socially very interesting but often very awkward places." We walk in and usually turn around to face the door. If someone else comes in, we may have to move. And here, according to Gray, lift users unthinkingly go through a set pattern of movements. He told the BBC what he had observed. He explained that when you are the only one inside a lift, you can do whatever you want--it's your own little box. If there are two of you, you go into different corners, standing diagonally  across from each other to create distance. When a third person enters, you will unconsciously form a triangle. And when there is a fourth person, it becomes a square, with someone in every corner. A fifth person is probably going to have to stand in the middle. New entrants to the lift will need to size up the situation when the doors slide open and then act decisively. Once in, for most people the rule is simple--look down, or look at their phones. Why are we so awkward in lifts? "You don't have enough space," Professor Babette Renneberg, a clinical psychologist at the Free University of Berlin, told the BBC. "Usually when we meet other people, we have about an arm's length of distance between us. And that's not possible in most lifts." In such a small, enclosed space it becomes very important to act in a way that cannot be construed  as threatening or odd. "The easiest way to do this is to avoid eye contact,"she said. According to Gray, when people enter a lift, they usually   _  .
turn around and greet one another look around or examine their phones make eye contact with those in the lift try to keep a distance from other people