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1 May 2003
Line dancing
Psychology
of queuing
By Terry Riley
You
will probably…. No, let me start over.
You will almost certainly wait in a line at some time on your next
trip. That line might be for a shuttle, a taxi, a hotel room, a sandwich, or
a beer. If you travel by air, you will
also surely stand in line at the airport.
Indeed, standing in line (standing on line, if you are in New Jersey) is so
much a part of air travel today that it deserves just as much attention as
flying.
Right on queue
Queuing is the standard method of determining service priority for customers
in most airports in the world—at least in the airports I pass through.
Passengers (including this one) seem to prefer it to the biggest- or the
strongest- or the loudest-served-first approach. However, standing in line
presents certain psychological pickles.
For instance, when multiple lines are available, there is a high probability
that a line other than the one you choose will move fastest. The more lines
that are available, the greater that probability. And although on average
you will select a line that gets you to an agent before half of the other
waiting customers, you don’t measure your movement against the average
moving line. You measure it against the fastest moving line, and if you’re
not in that line, you feel as though you are a victim of bad luck, bad
karma, or a conspiracy. (You’re not, but it sure feels that way.)
Another phenomena observed by my professional colleagues who study this sort
of thing is that the longer you are in a line, the less likely you are to
change to another line—even when you can see an alternate line moving
faster. This is indeed curious. Why the heck wouldn’t you jump lines if the
one you are in isn’t keeping up with the others around you?
The theory here is one of investment: the longer you are in a line of your
choosing, the greater the psychological investment you have in it’s ability
to live up to your expectations. Not only that, you fear that if you were to
abandon your chosen line, it will start moving again, and you will have lost
your investment in it. (Does this sound familiar to those of you who are
long-term holders of under-performing stocks? It’s the same theory.)
Stand by me
More recently, queuing up at an airline check-in counter means standing in a
single line feeding to all agents. The first-come-first-served approach is
quite popular with customers because of what we psychologists call social
justice. A single line all but eliminates the issues associated with
multiple lines. A single line gives customers the perception of fairness—to
a point.
There are, however, still issues associated with single-line waiting. For
instance, the longer you are in a queue, the more you will begrudge other
customers who are able to circumvent the regular line into which you have
been shuttled. For example, you are likely to resent passengers who are
moved ahead of you because their flights are departing soon. (Where’s the
social justice in that?) And as you approach the front of the line, your
psychological investment begins to convert to psychological ownership. You
are now more protective of your position in the queue and are much more
likely to rebuff line-cutters than you would have been farther from the
front.
So?
So what can you do to prevent falling victim to the aforementioned queuing
anxieties? Not much. I know all about them, and yet I come completely
unglued at the slightest hiccup in the application of social justice that
single queues are supposed to deliver. Indeed, on a recent trip, after my
wife and I stood back-to-back and belly-to-belly for nearly three hours with
about 500 other Aloha Airlines customers (many of whom are surely now
ex-customers), I came this close to throttling some poor woman and her son
who had the misfortune to step in front of us when we were within minutes of
reaching the coveted “next in line” position… and I know this stuff!
© 2003 Applied Psychology
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