My curiosity about this is occasioned by something that happened to me just this afternoon:
Swimming my laps in the public pool (which was pretty empty because of coldish weather) I got a bad cramp in a leg and had to drag myself some distance to the edge of the pool with breaststrokes, arriving just where the two municipial personnel assigned to supervise the pool were meanwhile busy having a chat. Now I was in no danger (not even distressed let alone drowning), but this made me realize: a bad swimmer with worse cramps might well have drowned metres away from them without them noticing.
The same phenomenom I have noticed at some very-low-security security posts: where in the airport you have to show your boarding pass prior to the security check, or where entrance tickets to a venue are taken, when two people are on duty but business is slow you can occasionally just walk by while they are having their conversation.
But there are occupations where people working together have to keep aware of their surroundings, not most of the time but all the time.
There are some pretty specialized ones like pilots and air traffic controllers, but these have to do something pretty frequently so there is less likelihood of them losing themselves in conversation.
For work were often nothing happens for quite a long time, the following tasks that a few Dopers will have been trained for come to mind for me:
[ul]
[li]police patrols[/li][li]guard duty in the military[/li][/ul]
My impression of pairs of police officers on foot patrol is that they do manage to have most of their attention directed outward, even when talking to each other. Which is different from most other people walking together - they mostly don’t pay attention to what’s going on around them.
Also I imagine militaries don’t much want a guard post of two to get oblivious of their surroundings.
So at least in these two cases there must some sort of purposeful conditioning involved, probably in training. How is that done generally?
From the military perspective, lack of attention on post can have very bad consequences for the soldier and their comrades. In a combat environment the threat of attack does a great job overcoming tedium. In a garrison environment the threat of a First Sergeant, Command Sergeant Major, etc. being displeased by inattentive sentries can also do a good job.
Conditioning for attention while on post is achieved by:
practice during basic training. Soldiers are given many opportunities to guard something and drill sergeants watch for and punish lapses in attention.
an organizational culture that values situational awareness and frowns on being ‘engrossed in conversation.’
Another thing in the military is rank. Usually when two people are assigned guard duty together it will be an NCO and a lower enlisted soldier, so they are not as casual with one another compared to equals.
When I was an enlisted man in the military my motives for doing a good job on guard duty depended on how important I thought my task was and how scary I thought the NCOIC was. For the most part, I tried to do a good job, more because of some work ethic my parents instilled in me as a child than anything else. That’s not to say that I never slacked off. But for the most part I was attentive, and that’s mostly because that’s the sort of guy I am. I really think that’s what it comes down to. If the police or military have good people it’s because they found and recruited them, not because they made them. At least IMO. And how good a job the recruiters do and how well the military or police do in selecting the bad apples *out *of the service or force varies considerably. Some of the best people I know in life are vets, but so are some of the worst. Likewise, while I’ve met some folks who seem to be pretty good cops, I know one or two that shouldn’t have a slingshot much less a firearm.
What else? Oh yeah. Sometimes soldiers do a good job watching stuff because they know somebody else may be watching them.
