Romantic Walk With Your Partner Unites Relationships

People move differently when they walk in groups than when they walk alone. And their walking style is especially distinct when they walk with children, according to a fascinating new cross-cultural study of pedestrians in several nations.

The study, which also shows that men tend to walk differently with other men than with women and that some cultures may promote walking speed over sociability, underscores that how we move is not dependent solely on physiology or bio-mechanics.

It is also influenced to a surprising extent by where we grew up and who we hang out with. Walking is the most common physical activity of the human species — and of many other species, too. It takes us to food, work, friends and contributes to physical fitness.

It also so mechanically and energetically complicated that if we actually had to think our way through each element involved, we might never move again.

Given this complexity, exercise scientists have long been interested in how we manage the physical demands of walking. In laboratory studies, they have determined that each of us has a particular pace at which we are most biologically efficient, meaning that we use the least energy.

In theory, this is the pace that we naturally would settle into when we walk.

WALKING SPEED

But other, real-world studies and observations indicate that people rarely perambulate at their most efficient pace. Impediments such as crowds, streetlights and scheduling concerns affect walking speed, of course.

But even on uncrowded pedestrian pathways, people often choose walking speeds that are slower or faster than their physiological ideal. Men, for instance, tend to slow their natural pace when they walk with women who are romantic partners, a few past studies show, but hasten their velocity when walking with other men.

Those studies were conducted in the United States or Europe, though.

Recently, Cara Wall-Scheffler, a professor of biology at Seattle Pacific University who has long been interested in the differences between how men and women move, began to wonder to what extent these interpersonal effects on walking pace might also be cultural.

WAYS OF LIFE

So for the new study, which was published this month in PeerJ — Life and Environment, she and her undergraduate student Leah Bouterse decided to set up mirrored examinations in two places with notably contrasting ways of life.

One was Seattle, the other Mukono, a town in central Uganda, where Wall-Scheffler spent a semester working at a local university.

In each city, she and Bouterse sought out a local pathway near a major market centre, where people often walked to and from stores and other attractions. The researchers identified permanent markers along the path, such as street signs, set about 30 feet apart.

Then Bouterse positioned herself close to each pathway and simply timed more than 1,700 people as they walked through the marked section and identified them on a checklist by gender, approximate age, any loads they carried, and who else, if anyone, they walked with, including children. (She focused on whichever walker was closest to her as a group passed by.) They did not include people who obviously were walking for exercise.

Finally, she and Wall-Scheffler compared the two cities’ results.

FINDINGS

People in Uganda, it turned out, walked much more quickly than those in Seattle when they were by themselves, their pace averaging about 11% swifter than lone walkers in the United States.

But they were slower in groups. Both men and women in Mukono strolled at a more leisurely pace when they were with others, especially children. Their pace when accompanied by children was about 16% slower than when they were alone, whether they carried the children or walked beside them.

The opposite was true in Seattle. There, people sped up when they walked with other people. Men were particularly hurried when walking with other men, but both men and women increased their pace if they had child.