Chapter 1: Why do people hate waiting in lines?
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Standing in line, it feels like pure misery. But what's so annoying about a line doesn't seem to be the time you spend in it. It's not counting the minutes. New research says our brains obsess over who's ahead of you and whether it seems like anything is actually moving.
I am here with one of the world's most premier line researchers, an associate professor at SPIA at the University of Pittsburgh, who's researched lines. Her name is Sarah Linardi. Sarah, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
I love that you chose as your research area lines and wading in them. What motivated you to dig in to how people feel about lines?
I am a behavioral economist, an experimental economist. And so I just do experiments on various questions that I really like practice to research.
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Chapter 2: What psychological factors influence our perception of lines?
So if we have questions from people on the ground, at that time we were thinking about buses in Pittsburgh, where it gets so full and people are like, I can't pick up my kid because I can't get in the bus. And someone else is just like, I just want to go get a coffee downtown. It's like,
And we're like, how do we get the parent to get on the bus so they can get their kid and the people who don't really have to get on the bus to like wait for the next bus? So the idea came from there. And it's like, can we think of a way? Because if you ask people, do you need to get on the bus now? Everyone's like, yes.
It's like, can you think of a way so that the people that don't have to get on the bus won't do it? And the people by like paying them, like, you know, by like coming up with some way to get people off the line. That's where it started.
Okay, so you incentivize people to leave and see how much they would want to leave based on that incentive. Let's get to the headline, though, complaining about waiting. It's funny, like anecdotally, people would say, oh, this restaurant, there's a long wait, but the line moves. People will say that to sort of describe a line is not so bad.
Chapter 3: How does Sarah Linardi conduct her research on waiting lines?
They won't talk about the time. And I think your study shows that's what people respond to. What are we kind of measuring when we when we suss out a line, when we look at a line and see whether it's something we want to wait in or not?
So we found that, yes, like you were saying, so I'm going to answer that question in two parts. Like once we're in the line, how do we suss out whether we want to continue staying? And then when we were looking at the line, how do we think about whether we want to stand in line or not? And it turns out that the two of them are pretty similar, which is that we see, is it long? Is it moving?
And interestingly, even when we had a clock and we showed people how much time is ahead of them, they still kind of treat these two things as separate. Like, is it long? Is it moving? And not really multiplying it in their heads.
Yeah. I feel like also maybe I know you didn't study traffic jams or maybe you did, but it's like I would rather take a longer route where the road feels like it's moving, you know, the scenic route than sit on a freeway or a highway in bumper to bumper traffic, even though it might be faster to take the major road.
I think like anecdotally, like this makes sense, even though what we should be looking at is how long the wait is, shouldn't we?
Mm hmm. Yeah. People have a very hard time actually, like, trading love between long, fast cues and, like, short, slow cues. Because it's... And what we find is also, like, what's really interesting is also that... So we're one of the first people, I think, if not the first to figure out how to translate this discomfort of waiting into like a specific monetary value.
So you could give you like a dollar value for like, you know, given the line, like how much you pay people to get off the line. But this is a situation where I can see the line ahead of me. Like I know how many people's ahead and then I know like how long or how slow the line is moving. But, like, what's really interesting is we've all felt, like, oh, so irritated.
Like, we're waiting, waiting, waiting. And you would think, like, okay, this should affect how much you're willing to get off the line. And we've also felt like, I have waited so long. Damn it, I'm going to finish it, right?
Sunk cost fallacy right there. Yeah, sunk cost.
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Chapter 4: What role do incentives play in line behavior?
In which case would I be more willing to bail or more easily paid off to exit the line?
I think you might be more willing to bail if the line is in the slow line, if the line was moving. You would be more willing to bail in the longer line.
Okay, well, there it is. Let's talk about this sunk cost thing. I said it earlier, like sunk cost fallacy. Walk me through a little bit what it means and what it means when it comes to waiting in lines.
So what it is, is you think about, hey, I've already been waiting. And the longer I wait, the more committed I get to finishing the line. Because the cost of waiting is like adding up in your head is like, I need to get at least this much out of the wait. And so when we ask people questions, that when we ask people, how committed are you to finishing the line?
Like at the survey question, we found that people do, we do see some movement there where like the longer they waited, they're like, I'm committed to finishing the line. But like, what's really interesting was when we say, okay, like how much are you willing to accept to leave the line? We don't see this affecting them in a reliable way.
Did you factor in like your peers judging you? Like, I feel like when I've been in a line for a long time and then I just kind of take a look around and leave, everyone in line kind of looks at me like, what an idiot. He bailed after wasting 10 minutes.
That is a good point. No, unfortunately, we do not have the social environment in the study. And the study was like pretty dry. You know, we had like fake layers and a digital sort of setup. And so you don't have people giving you the side eye.
I that's whenever I leave a line, I'm always like, oh, they must think I'm an idiot. And I kind of am because I waited for so long and now I'm leaving. Last question. Does your research kind of explain why some lines feel fair and others make people angry and feel unfair? And if so, how is that explained?
Our research doesn't address that. There are other research that have looked at people switching lines and they've also looked at prioritization in lines, like emergency rooms, for example, when you might have seen people that are waiting in a room and people are getting called ahead of you or you switch a line and then that line suddenly became slower. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: How do we determine whether to stay in a line or leave?
I love that you do this research. I love that someone's researching about something that people wait in every single day. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Oh, thank you.
Sarah Linardi is an associate professor at SPIA at the University of Pittsburgh. The world is changing. From the misuse of AI and the rise of deepfakes to the dangerous spread of misinformation, it's getting harder for Canadians to separate fact from fiction. That's why having a trustworthy news source is vital. At Global News, we're committed to objective journalism that cuts through the noise.
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