What your urinal choice says about you

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December 23, 2025 | 12:00am

Last week, I wrote briefly about the men’s urinal fly and how Kaizen thinking is helping janitors make their job easy. The core idea is to give users a psychological nudge to improve their accuracy and reduce urine splash back. It’s more effective than posting degrading signs like “Come closer. It’s shorter than you think.”

According to broadcast journalist Robert Krulwich, the urinal fly was a result of an internal study at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the early 1990s. Credit belongs to Dutch janitor Jos Van Bedoff although the management did not officially give credit to a single janitor in primary sources.

Whatever, their solution resulted in spillage rates dropping by 80 percent.

Since then, there were anecdotal accounts suggesting that some Victorian-era urinals used images like bees as crude targeting aid for the short horns to make it a good example in behavioral studies.

Red Lantern, an anonymous reader, was agitated when I wrote about the men’s urinal. He asked, with the seriousness of a philosopher confronting the meaning of life: “What if there are four available urinals in a shopping mall men’s restroom. The first one, closest to the door, is a kid’s urinal — lower, humbler and clearly not designed for ambitious grown-ups.

“The remaining three are standard, full-height partitioned urinals. Which one is the best choice? The second? The third? Or the fourth stall?”

..This issue may seem trivial to many people — something you’d casually flush away without a second thought — but not to Mr. Lantern. Whether we like it or not, this trivial issue opens the door to a deeper truth about human behavior.

It’s the same psychological principle behind the famous sticker fly in men’s porcelain urinals: give people a subtle target, and they’ll consciously aim better. No lectures, no scolding, no policy memo laminated and taped to the wall.

Just a small visual cue that quietly nudges behavior in the right direction. What looks like a minor detail is actually behavioral engineering at work — proof that humans don’t always change because they are told to, but because we can do it almost naturally.

Proxemics

The relevant theory here is proxemics — the study of how people use space around them and how they feel when that space is encroached upon. American anthropologist Edward Hall (1914-2009) had a groundbreaking work about this issue that showed “humans maintain invisible distance zones — the closer someone is, the more intimate or familiar the situation feels.”

Hall’s idea explains our everyday behavior — from elevator awkwardness to why people instinctively skip the middle urinal. In short, he showed that culture speaks even when we don’t — especially when standing too close to a stranger in a public toilet feels creepy.

He explained why standing too close to someone in a public toilet can feel awkward, while being too far can feel a bit cold, and why cultures quietly follow four invisible distance rules. If we loosely map Hall’s distance zones onto urinal choices, we’ll interpret it as follows:

One is the intimate distance or the closest zone. This represents the distance between the first and second urinal like the situation of a protective father accompanying his son using the first urinal.

Two is the personal distance zone representing the third urinal. It’s a reasonable buffer against other urinal users even if there are no other persons around.

Third is the social distance zone. It’s reserved for men and their acquaintances or friends who happen to coincidentally use the bathroom.

Four is a public distance zone for strangers. It’s for privacy-oriented and socially aware males who would pick the urinal furthest from the entrance. This reduces discomfort and stress in a public toilet.

Personal space invasion

Distance proves that how close someone stands next to you at a public urinal affects not only your dignity, but also your bladder’s willingness to cooperate.

A classic 1976 study, “Personal Space and Arousal” published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that men experienced delayed onset of urination and significantly higher discomfort when another man stood at the adjacent urinal, compared with situations where there was an empty one in between.

Our body reacts to personal space invasion faster than your manners can explain it. Researchers literally timed how long it took some men to start peeing while monitoring social spacing — turning an awkward human moment into peer-reviewed science.

So, when men instinctively choose a urinal with more distance, they aren’t being rude. They’re responding to genuine psychosocial stressors, quietly negotiating anxiety, territorial boundaries and social norms — one carefully chosen porcelain sanctuary at a time.

Whether you recognize it or not, the way we move and position ourselves in public spaces — especially intimate ones like restrooms — is shaped by long-standing social and psychological mechanisms.

Therefore, people don’t just guess where others should stand — they’re responding to real nervous system stress, social comfort zones and invisible cultural scripts about personal space and privacy.

So, the next time someone judges your restroom behavior, tell them you’re being guided by science on proxemics and personal space psychology. You can do that after washing your hands.

May your holidays be joyful and your inbox mercifully quiet!!

Rey Elbo is a quality and productivity enthusiast. Share your story to [email protected] or DM him on Facebook, LinkedIn, X or via https://reyelbo.com. Anonymity is guaranteed for those who prefer to use the urinals for boys in a public toilet.