The Definitive Book of Body Language - Barbara Pease [116]
People who sit in the front rows learn more,
participate more, and are more enthusiastic.
Those in the middle sections are the next most attentive and ask the most questions, as the middle section is considered a safe area, surrounded by others. The side areas and back are the least responsive and attentive. When you stand to the audience's left—the right side of the stage—your information will have a stronger effect on the right brain hemisphere of your audience's brains, which is the emotional side in most people. Standing to the audience's right—the left side of stage—impacts the audience's left brain hemisphere. This is why an audience will laugh more and laugh longer when you use humor and stand to the left side of the stage, and they respond better to emotional pleas and stories when you deliver them from the right side of the stage. Comedians have known this for decades—make them laugh from the left and cry from the right.
The Attention Zone
Using parameters by researchers Robert Sommer and Adams and Biddle, we conducted a study of audiences to estimate how much participation was given by delegates based on where they were sitting in a seminar room and how much they could recall of what the presenter was saying. Our results were remarkably similar to the original Robert Sommer study, even though our participants were adults and Sommer's were students. We also found few cultural differences between Australians, Singaporeans, South Africans, Germans, Brits, French, or Finns. High-status individuals sit in the front row in most places—most notably in Japan—and they participate the least, so we recorded audience data only where delegates were generally of equal status. The result was what we call the “Funnel Effect.”
Retention of information and participation by attendees based
on their choice of seat (Pease, 1986)
As you can see, when participants are sitting in classroom style, there is a “learning zone” shaped like a funnel, which extends directly down the center of an audience and across the front row. Those sitting in the funnel gave the most amount of participation, interacted most with the presenter, and had the highest recall about what was being discussed. Those who participated the least sat in the back or to the sides, tended to be more negative or confrontational, and had the lowest recall. The rear positions also allow a delegate a greater opportunity to doodle, sleep, or escape.
An Experiment in Learning
We know that people who are most enthusiastic to learn choose to sit closest to the front and those who are least enthusiastic sit in the back or to the sides. We conducted a further experiment to determine whether the Funnel Effect was a result of where people chose to sit, based on their interest in the topic, or whether the seat a person sat in affected their participation and retention. We did this by placing name cards on delegates' seats so they could not take their usual positions. We intentionally sat enthusiastic people to the sides and back of the room and well-known back-row hermits in the front. We found that this strategy not only increased the participation and recall of the normally negative delegates who sat up front, it decreased the participation and recall of the usually positive delegates who had been relegated to the back. This highlights a clear teaching strategy—if you want someone really to get the message, put them in the front row. Some presenters and trainers have abandoned the “classroom style” meeting concept for training smaller groups and replaced it with the “horseshoe” or “open-square” arrangement because evidence suggests that this produces more participation and better recall as a result of the increased eye contact between all attendees