There is a pattern to how people arrange themselves in elevators depending on the number of other passengers. (via The Morning News.)
If someone else comes in, we may have to move. And here, it has been observed that lift-travellers unthinkingly go through a set pattern of movements, as predetermined as a square dance.
On your own, you can do whatever you want – it’s your own little box.
If there are two of you, you take different corners. Standing diagonally across from each other creates the greatest distance.
When a third person enters, you will unconsciously form a triangle (breaking the analogy that some have made with dots on a dice). And when there is a fourth person it’s a square, with someone in every corner. A fifth person is probably going to have to stand in the middle.
I liked the part where it is explained why we are socially awkward in elevators.
“You don’t have enough space,” says Professor Babette Renneberg, a clinical psychologist at the Free University of Berlin.
Cheap Talk 
2 comments
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October 22, 2012 at 2:43 pm
artreviewed
OMG, Thinking about it, this is so true! And Ive never realised before! 😀
October 23, 2012 at 5:32 am
Greg Taylor
At the train station I use each morning there are three lifts, which seems to convert this into a version of your urinal game, with people arranging themselves in order to drive others into a later elevator car. I am not sure this behaviour is inefficient though: keeping people out is of practical importance during the morning commute because a latecomer not only reduces one’s personal space, but also delays the entire lift by making the doors open again.
Somewhat tangentially, on the subject of elevators, John Carmack poses the interesting thought experiment “how much more efficient [would elevator scheduling] be if you pressed a floor button on call instead of just up/down.”: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/257525684220604416