Active brown nosing

I've been noticing a very strange phenomenon recently during this glorious spell of good weather, many more people have been walking around at lunch-time. The strange thing isn't that there are more people walking around but more the way they walk around. Every day (at lunch-time) I walk around an office/industrial park in order to get some fresh-air and also to keep myself active. I have one of those jobs that involves sitting at a desk all day long and believe me 25 years of that takes its toll on your back and joints, movement is my friend! I tend to walk fairly fast and in a "determined" fashion, i.e. I'm not sight-seeing! 

Often I notice a huddle of people approaching me in the opposite direction, usually, if it's three or more people they form themselves into a straight line, this is obviously so that they can all participate in the same conversation, at this point they're effectively blocking the pavement (which is only wide enough for three people) When there's more than three you get two or more parallel lines of people. As I converge on the group one or more people speed up or slow down in order to break rank and move ahead or behind the group in order to allow me to pass unimpeded, but, occasionally no one moves and it's like a game of chicken! Today I actually walked right up to someone (nose-to-nose) who simply wouldn't move out of the way and was insisting on maintaining his rank. I'm not quite sure what this chap expected me to do, jump into the busy road? Or perhaps the many thorny bushes lining the non-road side of the pavement, anyway he quickly realised his error and stepped to the side. I wonder if this is male dominance behaviour, plain stupidity or something deeper?

I find the chicken game is much more likely to be played by groups of Men rather than Women, and I'm particularly suspicious of besuited sales types, some of whom clearly have a problem with their adrenaline glands being too big and their frontal lobes being too small. I wonder also if the problem is amplified when their "boss" is out walking with them, perhaps no one is willing to break rank first and risk missing out on a brown-nose opportunity with their governor? Perhaps they'd rather risk a collision than miss a single sage-word or witty quip from the person they are trying to impress, could this behaviour be an expression of insecurity?