Observations of drivers leaving parking spaces and people using phone boxes show that when we could do someone a favour, we're more likely to be awkward

If you see someone waiting for your parking space, be bloody minded

As pay telephones disappear from our cities, with them vanish opportunities to watch an entertaining, maddening form of behaviour. The behaviour was documented in a study called Waiting For a Phone: Intrusion on Callers Leads to Territorial Defence. The report came out in 1989, before mobile phones nudged public pay phones towards oblivion.

Professor R Barry Rubak, with some of his students at Georgia State University, performed an experiment. They began by asking people what they would do if, while talking on a public pay telephone, they noticed someone else waiting to use that phone. Most people said they would hurry up and terminate their call.

The researchers put that common belief to the test. They lurked discreetly near public telephone booths in the Atlanta area. Seeing someone engaged in a call on a pay phone, they would send a trained stooge to hover expectantly. The stooge "simply stood behind the caller, sometimes looking at his watch and putting his hands in his pockets". Sometimes they sent two stooges. Every stooge was "instructed not to stare at the subject".

In the absence of stooges, people's phone calls lasted on average about 80 seconds. When a single stooge stood near them, people stayed on the phone longer – typically about 110 seconds. And when two stooges queued up, clearly waiting, waiting, waiting for access to the telephone, people kept using that phone much longer – averaging almost four minutes.

After varying the experiment in small ways, trying to tease out exactly what was or wasn't happening, the researchers decided they had seen a clear cause and effect – that "people stayed longer at the phone after an intrusion, primarily because someone was waiting to use the phone".

Even in the absence of pay phones, one can, while strolling through town, see bursts of this kind of "territorial defence". They happen in the street and in parking lots, wherever motorists vie for parking spaces.

Prof Rubak went behaviour-hunting in a shopping mall car park near Atlanta. In 1997, he and colleague Daniel Juieng produced a report with a title that hints at more violence than the paper delivers: Territorial Defence in Parking Lots: Retaliation Against Waiting Drivers.

When the researchers saw someone get into a car, preparing to drive away, they measured the time until the car actually departed. They saw that, consistently, drivers took longer to leave if someone else was obviously waiting for their space.

Prof Rubak and his minions forced the issue, sending their own drivers, in various cars, all with particular instructions.

They learned that if their "intruding" driver honked a horn, the departing driver would take an especially long time to leave.

They also learned that men would leave more quickly if they saw that the person waiting to take their place drove a blatantly more expensive vehicle. Women, though, were not cowed by such things.

(Thanks to Marcy Weisberg and Frederic LePage for bringing this to my attention.)

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize​