Wrong. People like buffer seats in general but not above being a dick to other people. It’s perfectly valid to ask. The person has the right to refuse. If they do, I’ll set in the first row and assume the other person is an asshole.
I never come in late so I can’t address how that affects the situation.
Why is the other person an asshole?
Somebody really needs to run your IP.
Not sixteen … going on seventeen?
septimus, what part of this is so hard to understand?
Two people come in as movie is starting. You have a seat that for whatever reason you very much prefer (even if that reason is being a bit irrationally phobic of someone else’s germs). Despite the fact that there are other seats available they want you to move from that seat to give them the opportunity to have the seats they’d like better than other seats.
Are you under an unwritten social obligation to give up your preferred seat for the sake of their getting their preferred seats? Or is it something that would be a nice thing to do but not obligatory?
Some here apparently think yes there is an unwritten obligation to move and more think no. Of those who think no many would modify that based on whether or not any other seats were available. Some think it was rude to ask. Some think it was fine to ask but rude to not take a simple “sorry no” and move along. A very small number think that the op is a horrible horrible person for not giving up her preferred seat in order to help a couple sit together in their preferred seats. Apparently there are quite a few different humble opinions about what is obligatory in that circumstance. And a few who have a hard time living with the fact that others have different humble opinions than they have.
I apologize; I went too far to make a point.
Nevertheless I do see similarities in the altruistic-selfish axis between social interactions and political positions. (I’m far from sure however that the correlation is clearcut. “Greed is Good” political thinkers are alleged to be especially charitable personally.)
I’m from Australia, madamoseille.
Note that OP had option of shifting seats away from the germs, not toward them. Note that, according to OP, the only place for the two newcomers to sit together might be in one of the front rows.
If I’d been the newcomer I might have sat in front row rather than causing a disturbance. And if I’d been OP and in a slightly poor mood, I’d have been annoyed by the request and might even have refused it myself.
Similar, but for me far more common, situations arise when driving. Do you slow down when someone is overtaking, or wants to change lanes? I admit my choice often depends on my mood, but when I make the charitable move, it improves my mood and gives me pleasure, perhaps even a smile, that more than compensates for the lost three seconds.
I recommend making the charitable, altruistic play not for the benefit of the intruder but for the pleasure you should get from the act of charity.
I’m in my 60’s, have had health problems, but have thought of starting a MPSIMS thread “Despite everything, I’m happier than ever.” The happiness comes from shared smiles, not disdain and entitlement.
Then you are with the apparent majority who believe that it would have been a charitable, altruistic, even nice thing to do. The thing about altruism is that it is not required or even necessarily expected. It might be nice of me to give a few bucks to the person who comes up to me asking me to help him make bus fare so he can get to the shelter (which happens regularly in certain grocery store parking lots I shop in) but I am not obligated to do so and I am not a jerk when I choose not to do that. If that person then harassed me for not being charitable that particular moment I’d be very annoyed. And if I choose to get my pleasure from giving in other ways, or even not at all, that is my choice.
There is a difference between being charitable, and something that is an obligation. (And in your analogy, FWIW, providing some basic level of healthcare for all is, IMHO, an obligation, not being charitable. But that has been many other threads.) An obligation? You then do not really have the option to say you would not if you were in a poor mood or if the particular seat mattered to you for some reason that others did not appreciate or understand. Charity? You do have the option and your choice needs no further explanation.
The humble opinion discussion was simply whether moving over to a seat you would not like as much was a charitable act or a social obligation in a circumstance where other seats where available, even if those seats were not as ideal. Vitriol over disagreement about that seems disturbed.
Exactly. If you request a favor and then don’t politely accept no for answer, it becomes very clear that what you were actually doing was making a demand initially disguised as a favor.
That’s not to say you should assume every stranger’s request for a favor is really a demand, but personally I get asked for these favors all the time by strangers (it’s the nature of my job, and many of these are not even customers, but just people who think “hey, there’s a girl with a laptop, I’m going to tell her to use it to look up directions to Target for me, and then not even say thank you”) and I almost always do it. There are also a lot who are appreciative, but it does get old after a while.
It’s interesting that this simple matter has escalated so quickly into a huge thread. I think I know a reason: People are approaching the question with quite different perspectives.
The “Sitters” are viewing the issue through the lens of Rights and Responsibilities. The “Movers” view through the lens of what is Utilitarian or efficient. I wonder if many disputes arise because of this difference in perspective.
Perhaps I’ll be accused of hijacking, but I, a Mover, score as INTP (P for Perceptive) Myers-Briggs Type. The SDMB mode (mostly Sitters?) is INTJ (J for Judgmental).
You think being called a feminist is a terrible insult? Here, educate yourself.
I don’t know, I would have expected a discussion of the liberal paradox and Snowling’s research by now.
Check out The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt which is pretty much about how our opinions are formed first and then justified after the event.
I’m currently reading it and it’s an eye opener.
Nah. Just of being judgmental. 
The most utilitarian/efficient behavior, I think, would have been for the latecomers to sit in the seats that were already open. The judgmentalism of some is that fear of virus is not a good enough reason to deny a couple the pleasure of sitting together in the better seats, and then taking it farther to conclude that someone who judges otherwise is a bad person.
Which on preview seem to be a not too original idea.
This isn’t it at all.
There is a social norm that says move one seat over to accommodate other parties in the movie theatre. It is a nice, charitable, low-cost thing to do but it is not a strong obligation. True. But the norm binds only because everyone in a movie theatre believes that more or less everyone else will follow the norm. I don’t want to be the one person who moves when asked because that would make me a sucker. The content of the norm doesn’t give it force. It’s not like thou shalt not kill. The force comes from everyone’s desire to have a nice, orderly experience in the theatre without being a sucker. So for the norm to apply to anybody, it has to apply to everybody and this has to be common knowledge.
I personally get outraged when people somehow think their personal excuses trump following basic, low-cost social norms. This threatens the the stability of the norm in the first place. Sliding one seat down is how we do things here, just like waiting on line for tickets and at the concession stand instead of barging in and shouting like they do elsewhere. If enough people got burned when asking a fellow patron to slide over that everyone stopped sliding over, watching movies would be a shittier experience for everyone. So this norm exists for a reason.
This whole issue is different than politely declining some other miscellaneous request. It’s not a request in isolation, it is a request that follows from a behavioral guideline that is only useful when no one feels excepted from it. Only undersocialized people think the rules don’t apply to them.
It’s worth adding that the request to slide over has to be reasonable, and reasonable people can disagree about whether a request is reasonable. That’s how the thread started. But it took a left turn when people started claiming that there was simply no obligation to move ever once your ass is planted in the seat. This is the part that’s outrageous and has attracted the most scorn.
Ah. You fly directly into the two posts right before yours. See, because you personally have a belief that moving over in a movie theater is a social norm/expectation that is common knowledge, you believe that it is a belief that everyone has. But not everyone does. I have not once been asked to move over in a crowded movie theater, not even before lights went out, and I’d never even consider asking someone else to move their established seat to let my wife and I sit together in a better row rather than taking seats closer up or farther to the side than we’d prefer. We take the open seats and watch the movie. I’d ask someone to move their coats or purse off a “buffer seat” but that is it. I would not impose upon others in a movie theater like that. The only time I’d ask someone else to move would be if there were no other seats available, including the first rows. After lights out? Then we sit separated if those are the only seats open in the theater. My common knowledge belief (shared by many others in this thread apparently) is that you try to not disturb the experience of people already there, and especially so once lights are out. I would not do that to someone else and therefore someone asking me to do is asking me for a favor, like asking a stranger for bus fare, or perhaps to share my popcorn. If I comply it is because I am being nice.
So, in the phrasing of the book referenced by don’t ask you have a moral intuition that you see as a self-evident truth, making you righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong … outrageous … and worthy of scorn.
I agree with much of what you say, and think that the idea of not wanting to be a sucker is an important one. To many of us, the fact that there were other seats available was key; if I give up my preferred seats that I worked for by coming early to someone who has not worked (came late) and has other options, I am being a sucker.
See, lots of people here seem to think that we all have the same social rules about this, when clearly we don’t. Some people even saw fit to declare that their observation of the social rules was correct, and everyone who had a different observation was a dickhead or unsocialized. To be able to understand that others have different lives, and have lived in different subcultures is higher-level abstract thinking. My experiences have led me to believe it is only appropriate to ask others to move in the most dire of circumstances; clearly others come from experiences where asking others to move is commonplace. Those differing experiences lead to different social rules, and so on. In my understanding of the social rules, the couple who asked were breaking the social rules.
What I still don’t understand is why so many of those who felt she should have moved became so horribly mean. Name-calling, accusing others of lying, obliquely calling me mentally ill (for making the point that people have differing experiences and that opinions based on those are not universal truths, no less), and even breaking Pit rules – not that anyone seemed to care. What was it about their position that led to this? Was it just the personalities who were involved?
I think it is a common bully self-justification. From their perspective of what is self-evident someone who would not move is breaking what they think is a social norm and the bully midset is to delusionally see themselves as the enforcers of their perception of normative behavior, punishing the transgressors.
It started out as a reasonable thread and I think the debate just got so heated up that it led to being moved in the Pit, and this thread is quite harsh for the pit itself actually. Sometimes you just get threads like that.
I also think it’s because it’s a debate of niceness. People were arguing whether she was nice or an “asshole” and when you have debates like that, the people who think she’s an asshole start to think that the people who thought she was nice are also an asshole. Then it just went from there.
I don’t think the OP was an asshole, but I don’t agree with her actions either. But that’s what happens. Life is full of controversies.
It isn’t always this way, and didn’t have to be this way.