Turnalibi: Checking Your Phone Before You Turn Round in the Street

Turnalibi (n.): the small show of checking your phone, frowning and nodding before you turn round in the street, so that nobody thinks you were simply walking the wrong way. It happens on sunny pavements, outside bakeries and at the corners of quiet squares. You stride along with great purpose, realise the station is behind you, and understand at once that you cannot just turn round. A turn needs a reason, and the reason must be seen.

A turnalibi has a fixed order. First comes the slowing down, as if a thought had just arrived. Then the phone comes out and is studied with a small frown, though the screen shows only the time and a picture of a dog. Then the nod, which says: ah, I see, the plans have changed. Only then do you turn, calmly, like someone who has received new instructions from head office.

There are other forms for people with no phone to hand. The glance at the watch works well and has been in use for at least a century. The pocket pat suggests that something important has been left at home. The finger raised briefly in the air announces a sudden memory. Advanced performers use a shop window: they stop, admire a display of garden hoses with real interest, and leave it in the opposite direction.

The audience for all this is modest. It consists of a man eating a sandwich on a bench, a woman waiting for a bus, and a pigeon. None of them saw you walk past the first time. None of them is keeping a record. The man is thinking about his sandwich, the woman is thinking about the bus, and the pigeon is thinking about the sandwich too.

Turnalibis are rarely admitted. Ask anyone and they will say they just turn round, like a normal person. Then watch them leave a car park by the wrong exit. The most honest version belongs to small children, who stop, announce loudly that it is the other way, and go. Nobody thinks any less of them. Somewhere around the age of eleven the announcement goes quiet and the phone comes out.

The real idea behind it

Psychologists have a name for the feeling underneath: the spotlight effect. We tend to believe that other people notice what we do, and how we look, far more than they really do. In a well-known experiment published in 2000, students were asked to walk into a room of classmates wearing a T-shirt they found embarrassing. The wearers guessed that about half the room would remember the shirt. In fact only about a quarter did.

The reason is simple and rather comforting. Each of us stands at the centre of our own day, so our own small mistakes feel brightly lit. Everybody else is standing at the centre of theirs, busy with a sandwich or a bus. So the turnalibi is a show put on for a theatre that is almost empty. You may keep performing it, of course; it does no harm, and the frown is good practice. But you could also just turn round. The pigeon will not tell anyone.