Civil Inattention

Civil inattention is the respectful recognition of a stranger in a public space without treating that person as an object of curiosity or engaging with them further. It lets two strangers acknowledge each other's presence, typically through a brief glance followed by a deliberate withdrawal of attention, while each still signals recognition of the other's personhood. The sociologist Erving Goffman described civil inattention as one of the everyday rituals that let people share crowded public spaces such as streets or train platforms without treating every passing encounter as an invitation to interact, distinguishing it from openly hostile behavior such as a fixed stare or a pointed refusal to acknowledge someone at all. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/