In the 80s, the psychologist Stanley Milgram sent 130 researchers into New York with a simple mission: queue-jumping. Milgram is better known for his studies on obedience, in which ordinary people were induced to give dangerous electric shocks - or so they believed - to unseen victims. Perhaps his queue-jumping experiment wasn't so controversial, but it was provocative enough: researchers were told to find a queue, enter it between the third and fourth person with the words, "Excuse me, I'd like to get in here", and see what happened. What happened was this: half the time, no one said a thing; only 10% of the time was there a serious confrontation. Milgram speculated that this wasn't just because people fear conflict, but because every member of a queue has an interest in keeping it orderly: better to absorb a solitary rulebreaker in silence than to lose your place to admonish the culprit, risk a fight that slows everyone down or trigger the collapse of the queue. Respect for this firm-but-flexible orderliness must be why the British love queues, since it surely can't be that we're a nation of sheep who enjoy delays because they give us something to moan about.
Queues aren't just a microcosm of the unspoken rules governing human interaction. For many of us, they're also the context in which we most often confront impatience and frustration, those ubiquitous, low-level obstacles to a happy life. Companies know this, and deploy numerous tactics to make the time pass more quickly. Indefinite waits seem longer than defined ones, writes business guru David Maister in The Psychology Of Waiting Lines, which is why Disney theme parks use complex formulae to calculate and display wait-times. "Pre-process" waits seem longer than "in-process" waits, which is why restaurants will seat you before they're ready to serve you. Customers are happier when queues are acknowledged: when a supermarket calls "all staff to the checkout", it's as much about you hearing it as about staffing. And occupied time passes faster than unoccupied time: mirrored walls are especially effective, because most people love looking at themselves.
If you're in the mood for self-improvement, queues are also the perfect opportunity to develop what Albert Ellis called "high frustration tolerance" - observing our thoughts and learning to distinguish preferences ("I'd like to get served soon") from the absolutist "musts" that cause negative emotions ("I must get served soon, and this waiting is intolerable!"). And queues bring sharply into focus how much of our lives we spend in a queue-like state of mind, leaning into the future, absorbed in thoughts about later, wanting it not to be now. Can you, as Eckhart Tolle suggests, relax into the waiting instead, treating it as an oasis, a pause in the rush of events?
Yeah, me, neither. But it's worth a try: figure out how to find enjoyment in a queue, and you'll be able to find it in almost anything.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
