Please! Have Your Boarding Pass Ready (or prepare for the wrath of the efficient)
why people forget they're getting on a plane
I was recently listening to an episode of Jim Power & Chris Johns podcast (you should subscribe, especially if you’re interested in economics and current affairs). Chris and Jim were describing recent troubles they encountered flying through various airports - odd, inefficient, seemingly mindless behaviour on airplanes and the like. They, like me, treat flying as a logistical exercise, with efficiency and progress as the over-riding goal in mind, and find it difficult to understand why others don’t do the same.
I thought it would be a little bit of fun, therefore, to talk a little about what happens in airports a bit using a social psychological lens where we can look specifically at spatial behaviour and social friction (what is sometimes called proxemics).
I commonly observe, for example, when queues are forming in airport check-ins or boarding areas, that many people don’t walk up to the head of the boarding line, but instead hang back 5 or 6 or 10 metres and then get annoyed if you walk past them to the correct formal ticket point or boarding point.
Why is this? They’re in the wrong, aren’t they? Well, yes, they are wrong, but it’s complicated…
If you hang around airports or watch people when queuing, you’ll see that this is a very common phenomenon; what you are witnessing is a collision between two different definitions of what constitutes a queue [or what Americans call a line].
In social psychology, proxemics refers to the studies of how humans use space and the effects that population density has on their behaviour. We should be generous and start by noting that airports are high-stress environments where people who do not know each other come into close proximity to each other, crowded together, while attempting to navigate ambiguous and often very badly laid out spaces.
When people feel anxious cramped or overcrowded by others they may try to extend or expand their own personal ‘space bubble’ to maintain some sense of control: by hanging back a few metres, they are unconsciously creating a buffer zone, allowing them to avoid physical contact with other strangers. Moreover, standing back allows them to scan the area generally, and make them feel less trapped by the presence of other than they would be if they reduced their personally-available space by standing close to the next person in the queue [what we might refer to as a defensive stance].
There are, in fact, different types of queues: a conceptual queue, and a physical queue.
