The Waiting, Part 1

In this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, Robert and Joe discuss waiting in line and psychology of queuing up.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of
My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
And to introduce today's topic, I wanted to start off
by referring to a news article that I found from

(00:23):
last year. So this is a local news article from
the Santa Clara, California area from March. Remember remember that
scary time back when there was a lot of panic
buying going on because COVID was just starting to dawn
on people and suddenly everybody was like, oh, yeah, okay,
we gotta stock up. We don't know when we're gonna
be leaving the house, and so forth. And so this

(00:44):
article is referring to the fact that there were long
lines at the cost Co in Santa Clara, California in March.
And one element of the story that I thought was
very interesting was that the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff Station
was on Twitter at some point begging people not to

(01:05):
call nine one one because of people cutting in front
of them in line. Their tweet read, please don't call
nine one one because people are cutting in front of
you at line at the store. It ties up valuable
resources for real emergencies. But the funny thing is that
you would have to say this at all. I mean,
it seems kind of obvious to me that somebody cutting
in front of you in line at the store is

(01:26):
very rude. But this is not a police matter. But
I've noticed a lot of you know, informal reports and
uh and and even in kind of a recurring theme
of don't be this person viral videos online lately is
people calling the cops on someone allegedly cutting in front
of them at the drive through line at burger King

(01:48):
or something like that. And it makes me wonder, why
would it be common for people to believe that cutting
in line at a customer service point is a crime
on a level that merrits the summoning of armed officers
of the law. Well, I guess we we should point
out that if if there is a situation where one

(02:10):
party or even two parties are sort of violating the
you know, the social norms of of lines and waiting
in line, that itself may not be a crime, but
you could imagine where the resulting dynamics could rise to
the point of a crime. I mean, if if if
it becomes an aggressive enough encounter, you know, then it

(02:31):
it could rise to the level of threats and assaults.
So it's not to say that it's an it's something
that's in an entire separate universe and could never rub
up against those those real criminal um activities. But yeah,
did the mere act of someone just like jumping ahead
of you in line, uh and and not acknowledging you
like that that does that is certainly not a police matter.

(02:53):
Police have better things to do than get called about that, right,
But it's funny that at least some people in two
watively think of the idea that somebody allegedly cut in
front of them in line at at at a customer
service situation is on the level of being you know,
robbed at gunpoint or something that you need to get
the cops here about this. But you see people react

(03:15):
very um alarmingly at times. Oh yeah, for instance, okay,
so so right before this podcast, and I got some
coffee and there was no line to order the coffee,
but there was a line to wait on the coffee,
which was an interesting experience I'll get back to, but
it reminds me of a very recent, uh experience I
had at a coffee shop at an airport where there

(03:37):
was a line to get the coffee, and then there
was a long wait to receive the coffee. And I
everybody's wearing a masks at the at the coffee establishment,
so it's it's extra difficult to hear what people were saying.
And I had one of those moments where I thought
my name was called my last name and I and
I went forward and I almost touched the bag of

(03:58):
someone else's order, and it was it was this older
couple and um, and I was like, oh, I'm sorry.
I thought they said lamb and the the uh the
wife of the of the husband and wife pair here.
She was like, oh, that's all right, it happens all
the time, and the and you know, that's that's that's reasonably.
She was like, oh, that's happened to us. But the

(04:20):
man he was, he was angry and he like grabbed
it and he was like making evils at me, like
I was trying to steal his food. And as he
marched off, trying to remember what was it he was saying,
he was not saying good day, sir. He was saying oh,
he was saying bye bye. He was he was like
spitefully saying bye bye to me, which is something I
had never heard before. I've never heard bye bye used

(04:41):
as a so aggressively. But it was a very weird experience.
And I guess if I'm going to try and put
myself in in in his shoes, if he thought that
I was actually trying to to break in line and
just randomly steal whatever food and coffee he had ordered, um,
then it's kind It's kind of like cutting in line
can be equated to theft, like if everybody's in a

(05:04):
line to get the same thing at a store, like
it's a lemonade stand, they only sell the lemonade. If
someone cuts in front of me, then they are on
some level stealing my lemonade. I don't know. It's amazing
that even at the level of remove of you describing
an experience that you almost had but didn't. I felt

(05:25):
the dragon flies, you know, a light in my stomach,
Like it was just just just terror at the idea
of such a faux paw right, I mean, because I
guess it does gollustrate two different energies like we we
I think a lot of us, if not most of us,
have that fear of transgressing the social norm of standing
in line and waiting on food and service. But on

(05:46):
the other hand, uh, you know, sometimes we're we're extra
on guard against violators of those social norms, so it
can create very weird and uneven energy. Yeah, the idea
of accidentally cutting in line is just horrifying to me,
Like the idea that I might do that is enough
to to cause that panic, like I'm about to you know,

(06:08):
go on stage and speak in public or something that
level of of apprehension. And I think we saw probably
a lot of this during the pandemic because a lot
of places that depended more on interior spaces had to
suddenly depend on exterior spaces, which means lines that might
be better managed in an entirely indoors or in partially
partially indoors environment were suddenly left to exist entirely outside

(06:33):
the establishment. And I've seen cases of this where like,
clearly this was not what was intended. So the the
resulting line situation is maybe more confusing or counterintuitive, and
people fall you know, show up and fall into it
and and maybe like miss where they're supposed to stand,
creates confusion, creates more opportunity for misunderstandings. So what we're

(06:57):
observing is that at least among lots of people, there
is a deep, powerful commitment to upholding the norms of
the single file, first come, first serve line for all
different kinds of UH services and access to things. And
when you observe this level of commitment to a norm,

(07:18):
I think it's very easy to assume that maybe lining
up single file for your turn at something is a deep,
almost biologically mandated behavior that goes back as far as
recorded history and as universal across cultures. But you should
always be cautious about drawing conclusions like that, because it
turns out, in the case of the single file, first come,

(07:38):
first serve line, this is absolutely not the case. There
are a lot of fascinating features of of waiting in line,
or queueing as it's more often referred to in the
scientific literature UH, and we'll get into more of those
as as we discussed this topic for the next couple
of episodes. But one of the fascinating things is that
queuing is to a large extent, historically and culturally contingent.

(08:01):
Not everybody gets in line for things, and even in
cultures where we do we haven't always done it that way. Yeah,
Queuing is it's it's a pretty interesting phenomenon because on
one level, we often see this behavior as a means
of self organizing, sometimes via non human directions such as
signs or ropes. There's not you know, there's not a
person there to yell at you if you get out

(08:22):
of line. Other times there is a person there to
yell at you, um, and such as with say T
s A. Agents who you know they're doing an important job,
but a lot of times they're not shy about raising
their voice. Uh. And other times it's just out of
necessity in cases where there are no rules, but there
is a social pressure to form a queue of some sort,

(08:43):
you know, where people realize like there's no there's nothing
to indicate how we should line up in order to
to enter an establishment or get up to the register,
So people just figure it out on their own, sometimes poorly,
sometimes with like the line going completely across the sidewalk
so that people can't cut through. Things like that, And
then oftentimes you see someone having to come out and say,
let's actually make the line go against the side of

(09:04):
the building, et cetera. Yeah, but I think one thing
that's pretty amazing about lines is that if you're in,
if you're in culturated in lines, if queuing is a
part of your culture and your upbringing, it's amazing how
regularly people spontaneously organized into lines and how little problem
they have with it overall. Yeah, I mean, and ultimately

(09:25):
comes down to a basic reality. Some come first by
necessity in order to assure everyone proceeds, and a lot
of times that is a first come, first serve situation.
Whoever is first gets to stand in line first. Um,
and it just avoids chaos, right Yeah. But of course,
while queuing can seem very fair and democratic, though though

(09:45):
in the in the UK it was, it was even
accused of it was accused of being a product of socialism.
I found an interesting paper about that. Maybe we'll get
into that more later. Um, we have no shortage of
ways to make queuing less of an even a fair
Various rules always seem to exist to allow people to legally,
you know, within the social contract, to legally break line,

(10:07):
to form separate lines, faster lines, etcetera. So it can
often depend on where you are in the line and
who you were and who you are in the line,
what you're waiting for, etcetera. Uh. To determine exactly how
fair this whole system seems, though, I find something that's
interesting is that if there are standing line breaking mechanics

(10:29):
in place, uh, those mechanics are often hidden from view
in one way or another. Like the institution that has
the line that that allows some kind of organized line
breaking for preferred waiters. Uh, Like they try to keep
it sort of separate so people don't see somebody just
cutting straight in front of everybody else. But but not

(10:50):
at the airport, um, you know, because it's basically like,
all right, do we have any babies, Okay, let's get
some babies on board. Okay, how about old people, soldiers? Okay,
rich people? Do you have any rich people in the group?
You know? It's it's it. It's not how they do it, obviously,
but but sometimes they can smack of that, especially if
you were in like loading group, you know, thirteen or whatever. Um,

(11:11):
I guess there's no way to hide it. If it's
an airplane, there's just this one access point. Everybody's waiting
in the same place. But when it's possible, I think
a lot of places really do like to keep it
keep it sort of out of you in some way. Yeah,
I will say at airports I've been to, they'll often
have to have it set up. So the t S
A pre check line, uh is is maybe it's maybe
like a little less obvious, but at the same time,

(11:32):
like something like the t S A pre check line
is something they want, well, they want participants to take
advantage off. So you don't want to ride it completely.
Uh So I kind of like with your fast pass
at an amusement park. You don't want it to make
you don't want to make everyone miserable, but you do
want to sell fast passes. Um So, I guess you
don't want to sell exclusively fast passes. So, but I
imagine that's worked out in the uh in the price

(11:55):
gauge and all. Have you ever read the stuff about
the the alleged I mean, I I don't know this
is true for sure, but it is at least alleged
that some amusement parks think of wait times not just
as something that's necessary, you know, because everybody can't ride
the roller coaster at the same time, but also as
something that extends the perceived value of what there is

(12:18):
to do at the amusement park because if you could
just ride every roller coaster in order, you know what,
You've got like an hour of fun there, and then
then there's nothing else to do. You've already done everything.
So by having people wait in line for things, that's
not only a necessity, it also allows you to stretch
out the perception of having fun over the course of
an entire day. So people are like, Wow, I got

(12:39):
to do this all day. It was really great. Huh yeah,
I don't know. Um. I mean the thing about amusement
from for my money, I don't want to go from
roller coaster to roller coaster because that will make me sick.
I need some time to settle down. I also kind
of like a certain amount of anticipation building up to
the ride, and some rides you're nicer. Amusement parks tend
to do a really good job of making your your

(13:00):
way more pleasant, uh you know, or or out there.
Another specific example I'll point out is the nether World
Haunted attraction here in the Atlanta area. Uh. Often you'll
be a long line, there'll be some sort of fast
PAS scenario, but you'll end up going through a museum
of the haunted attraction as part of the line waiting experience,

(13:23):
which is that kind of thing I really appreciate, um,
you know, where it makes the line a little more
part of the experience and not just this dull thing
you're doing in order to have the experience. Yeah. I
have not been to a lot of amusement parks. Uh,
maybe not any as an adult that I can remember.
I don't know, maybe maybe I'll think of an exception,
but I remember as a child going like Universal Studios, Florida,

(13:44):
and one thing that that they did something like that,
They're We're saying, you're waiting in line for the Jaws ride,
and they've got a kind of backstory for you. So
they've got TVs playing things that set up the ride.
And I think something similar was true of like the
Back to the Future ride, Like the ride has a
back story and as you're going through the line, you're
watching TV stations playing various segments of the back story. Yeah. Now,

(14:08):
it's interesting with both the Haunted attraction and the amusement
park ride. Essentially these are examples of especially with the
Hunted attraction, you're standing in line to walk through in
a line, and in the case of the ride, you're
standing in line to go in a circle and then
leave and continue your line out of the the exhibit.
But a lot of times we're talking about standing in
line for resources. Uh. And and this this got me thinking.

(14:31):
I was looking around a little bit of the animal world,
and you'll you'll often read something about something like queuing
in terms of dominance among social animals. For instance, I
was reading to account about how some baboons, Uh, there's
something with some with baboons, there's something like queuing that
has arrived at after food is discovered, and it's something
that's governed by the dominant primate in the group. So

(14:52):
it's not a very fair system of queuing by most
human standards, but it is a system and it prevents
the need for overt conflict and strug goal amid these individuals. Right.
So it's important to make a distinction because anytime you
have multiple people trying to get access to the same
thing and they can't all access that at the same time,
you've got to have some system for ordering access. But

(15:14):
what we're talking about when we say waiting in line
is almost always understood to mean the relatively egalitarian, first come,
first serve, single file line, which is very which is
very different than what the baboons are doing. Yeah, and
oh man, we haven't even got into the spacing of lines,
which of course has become certainly more of a thing

(15:34):
during pandemic times. Uh, sometimes obeyed as part of the
social norm, sometimes disturbingly ignored. Uh. But prior to the
pandemic you at least saw it with A T M
S where there was this kind of agreed upon social
contract that if you were waiting in line behind me
at the A t M and I'm at the A
t M, you will like stand back a certain amount

(15:55):
us it would be impolite, if not threatening, to stand
too close to me during this transaction. What's that line
from the SNL song The Creep? I think it's something
like when you want to make a friend at the
A T M do the creep? Oh yeah, where they're
all dressed like John Waters, and I believe John Waters
makes an appearance in that. Yeah, But the point being
you don't approach people too closely at the A t M. Yeah. Um.

(16:17):
Now this is kind of a stretch, but I admit,
but this got me thinking about another key example of
line formation among humans, not the vertical lines of cues
or people following a path, but the horizontal lines of
rank and file armed combatants. Uh, the sort of ordered
approach to the movement and action of human beings that
has been vitally important in the history of warfare, because

(16:39):
on one level, it's entirely unlike forming a line to
use an a t M or to get buy a
hot dog, et cetera. But there is also a sense
of it there as well. I think if you, you know,
if you sort of open your mind and compare the
two where a discipline system is in place to ensure
peak performance of the group, benefiting the whole group but
also the individuals within the group. You know what I'm say, Oh,

(17:00):
I see that comparison. Did you bring this up because
you've been reading that blog about military history and analyzing
Tolkien that you sent me? Yes, it is no, no, no,
that that's really good because one of the things you
sent me was an article or at least a quote
about how the thing you see with medieval style or
ancient style battles in movies where it's just an all

(17:21):
out melee, you know, free for all, or everybody's just
fighting random combatants in whatever order it seems to occur
to them that this is not at least how battles
were supposed to go in in ancient combat, where you'd
be using spears or swords handheld weapons. I mean that
in most cases you want to be fighting in formation
or you're losing. Yeah. That that blog is a collection

(17:42):
of unmitigated pedantry by military historian Bret C. Devereaux. And yeah,
he makes the point where if if it's broken out
into just chaotic melee, uh, that means the battle has
already gone poorly. And if if you're if you're you know,
you may have already lost at that point, you probably
have already lost. But if you if you're gonna win,
then you haven't broke rank. Like the winners don't break rank,

(18:04):
they stick together and stay in formation. And I think
the same is true of standing in line. Like if
people start breaking rank, if people start panicking, then then
it's all over. Like nobody gets to use the A T.
M machine if this order breaks down, nobody gets to
buy a hot dog or a cup of coffee, nobody
gets to board the plane. Yeah, of course, so nobody
enjoys waiting in line. But you've got to acknowledge that

(18:25):
waiting in a first come, first serve line for the
A t M is much better than using the shoving
to the front method. Yeah, I guess unless you're really
good at shoving. But to be serious for a minute,
if you already use the shoving to the front method
and you do actually get to the A t M,
what happens to you once you get your cash? I mean,
this is a recurring problem. I think if you don't
have a well organized system for for getting people access

(18:48):
to service points. Yeah, if you totally dismantle the social
norms leading up to the A t M, then what
about the rest of the social norms surrounding the whole experience?
Though I do want to say that this doesn't necessarily
mean that the the single file, first come, first serve
line is the only way to organize access to things.
There are other ways that people have come up with
sort of social rules for organizing access. This is just

(19:11):
a very common one in the modern world, in the
Western world, especially thank thank thank Now. I was wondering
about a question which was how much of our lives
do we on average spend waiting in line? And I
had some trouble finding a really solid, well reasoned answer

(19:32):
to this. But there is one thing, at least the
closest thing I've come across, which I found in an
article by Anna Swanson called what really drives you crazy
about waiting in line? It actually isn't the weight at all.
This was published in the Washington Post, and for this article,
Swanson interviews Richard Larson, who is a professor who studies

(19:53):
queuing theory at m i T. That's actually an area
of study. Now, it's a little bit broader than just
people standing in per person on their feet in a
single file line. It's more about like about like ordering
access to things, and they're all kinds of mathematical theories
about how to maximize efficiency in systems that use various
forms of queueing and so forth, and so Larsen studies

(20:14):
that type of thing. But Larson estimates that quote altogether
some people spend a year or two of their lives
waiting in line. Now, a big note here is that
the some people is about the best you can do there,
because the amount of time people spend waiting in line
will have enormous variants depending on what culture you live in,
what kind of business you do, whether you live in

(20:35):
a city or in the country, etcetera. But for this
common guess of one to two years, how would you
arrive at that? Well, Larson's research makes him think that
for many Americans at least the majority of their Q
time is actually spent waiting in traffic congestion, which is
interesting because I wouldn't have thought about traffic as a

(20:57):
form of waiting in line. But I guess by almost
every way of defining it, really it is. Yeah. I mean,
we may not think about it as much, but we are,
you know, proceeding in lines. And granted there are varied lines,
there's a certain amount of cutting in line that is,
that is very much part of the legal process. Though
you do see breakdowns in this where it becomes super obvious,

(21:19):
you know, where like say, situations where a lane is
closed ahead and everyone needs to merge to the right,
and you'll have some people that are like, Nope, I'm
going to go as far in the left lane as possible,
and then I shall insist on being let into the
appropriate lane. Stuff like that. That'll, at least I know
it in me, it'll raise the accusation of of line cutter.

(21:41):
You know, I'll be you know, I won't actually shake
my fist or anything. But I'm inside, are we thinking
that person? They are no good? They are they are
breaking the rules here. So in practice I hate it too,
But I have a terrible piece of wisdom on the
subject that I'm sure we'll cause your polite and orderly
mind to revolt, but I have to share it. So

(22:01):
among experts who study traffic queuing, the late merge is
widely considered to be superior to the early merge. Basically,
the thinking is that, if say a two lane highway
is narrowing down to one lane for construction, drivers should
use all the lanes available to them for as long
as they can, and then take turns one by one,

(22:24):
merging into the bottle neck. Now, this doesn't necessarily move
the cars through any faster than an early merge system,
but it's still is more efficient because it reduces the
backward stretching length of the traffic jam, though I did
find at least one case where it was found to
speed up the traffic moving through the bottle neck. There
was a New York Times article from October by Christopher

(22:47):
Melee about late merging, and it's cited a study from
the Colorado Department of Transportation that found late merging and
work zones led to a fifteen percent increase in the
volume of cars passing through, and that it cut the
length of the backup on the road in half. But
either way, it's also considered superior because it's safer since

(23:08):
the merging one at a time in the zipper like
fashion tends to happen at a predictable way at lower
speeds than early merging does. So so I hate it too.
And when I see somebody running down the open lane
and merging late, it looks selfish. If you do it,
it feels selfish when you see it. I'm like, you jerk.
But but it's probably, unfortunately, what everybody should be doing

(23:32):
for the greater good. Well, I have a hard time
imagining that the person that the people that I often
see doing this are doing it because they're they're well
acquainted with queuing theory, and then they're like, I'm doing
the responsible thing. Don't look at me, weird, you know.
I imagine they're they're also being aggressive in other aspects
of their driving experience, right, But then again, queuing theory

(23:56):
professors they have to drive to So perhaps the last
person that I judge how actually was Richard Larson. I
don't know that's quite possible. Were you in Massachusetts at
the time, No, but you know, maybe maybe he was
going to Florida. I don't know, yeah, but anyway, So
the the idea is that the majority of time that
people spend waiting in line, on average, Again, there's gonna

(24:17):
be huge variants from person to person, but on average
is probably waiting in traffic congestion, which is in a
way waiting in line because you are queued up for
access to something. In this case, what you're usually queued
up for access to is a a bottleneck in the
throughput of the traffic on the street. So how do
you get to the one to two years number? Well, uh,

(24:39):
Larson explains as follows. Suppose that a home to work
trip on a Sunday morning takes you thirty minutes, but
on a working weekday it takes you sixty minutes. That
corresponds to thirty minutes each day each way of traffic
caused queuing, sixty minutes of traffic queuing each day, or
three minutes each week. If you make reasonable assumptions, about
five day is a week of driving like this both

(25:01):
ways for an entire career. Then one comes up with
figures of one to two years of your waking life
spent in queues, mostly rush hour traffic cues and slowness,
which is equivalent to queuing. So that's very back of
the envelope, and that's just traffic, but it does make
you realize how much of modern American life is going
to be characterized by simply waiting for access to things. Uh. Though,

(25:26):
It's also interesting to me because I was thinking, well,
some people might quibble with whether traffic actually counts as
queuing or not, and and that raised the question why
it's sort of in itself interesting, Why would people not
think of traffic as a form of waiting in line?
I would say it is. It's definitely waiting in line.
It's even more dangerous waiting in line because you're in

(25:48):
a large vehicle that can cause fatalities. You are you
are also, I mean, without even getting into the whole
issue of road rage, you're in a You're in an
area where we see the social norms sometimes take on
different forms, and it becomes it can become more difficult
to associate those other cars with individual people in ways

(26:09):
that you don't see in an actual in person line. Um,
I guess on one level, I'm tempted to say, well,
if you're in your car, at least you can listen
to a podcast. But of course with mobile technology you
can you can if you if you think to bring
your headphones, you can do so in a in an
actual in person line as well. So I don't know sure. Okay,
here's another queuing theory question that that I've wondered about.

(26:30):
Let's say you're waiting in line for a number of
service points, maybe three bank tellers. There are a couple
of different ways that the bank can organize the waiting process.
Uh So, for example, they can have individual lines for
each bank teller and you just pick which line to
get in, or there can be one single snaking line

(26:50):
and once you get to the front of it, you
go to the next available teller. I was wondering, is
it actually is one of these actually more efficient than
the other, or are they about the same? Well, it
turns out there's an answer to that, and it's sort
of what you would guess if you think about it.
This also was by way of Richard Larson in that
same Washington Post article on average weight times for the

(27:11):
two systems are about the same, so you know, you
average it out over a lifetime, it's not going to
make a major difference. But there is much more variance
for weight times in the multi line system, so there
is a greater chance that you get through either very
quickly or you get stuck for a long time. So
I think the individual line system can be thought of
more as the gamblers system. Right when you want to

(27:33):
roll the dice on your weight time, that's the better
way to go. But if you want to have a
more predictable experience, the serpentine line is better. So of
course the having multi the multi line system is going
to be the one where you inevitably end up saying
to yourself, oh I picked the wrong line, or perhaps
you say, oh I picked the correct line. But um
so I guess the experience is going to be a

(27:54):
little more different. Is there gonna be a little different
depending on it Now, of course, it's not actually possible
that that it would really be the case over the
course of a life that the other line always moves faster.
So the fact that the other line always moves faster
really tells us something about human psychology, right that we
tend to notice more when things are not going our way. Now.

(28:15):
The many short lines approach, of course, also lends itself
to tiered systems stuff like t s, a pre check
or speed pass an amusement park. Uh. And depending on
how this is arranged, it might make for increased deficiency
uh and or gives some individuals or groups an unfair advantage.
Or maybe it's a fair advantage. It really depends on
your vantage point on these particular incidents. Uh Huh. I

(28:37):
wanted to go to an historical example on this. I
was looking around and I was thinking, well, you know, queuing.
You know, given that this is something that people have
had to do for a long time, like, but you
do see some cultural differences. What's a what's a nice
like ancient example of queuing? And I found a pretty
good one. I think it's um, it's from the ancient world,
and it requires to visit, uh, the Oracle of Delphie.

(29:00):
Now we've we've I don't think we've ever really talked
about Delphi in depth on the show before. I think
it came up briefly in our Bicameral Mind episode. But
we could totally do a whole series on it because
there's a lot of interesting angles. You know, you have
mythology history. There's also there's a whole chemical discussion to
be had as well. Oh yeah, about what like huffing

(29:20):
volcanic gases possibly or something. Yeah, but he But here's
the basics. The ancient Greeks considered Delphi to be the
center of the world, and it's here that the the
Omphallus of Delphi mentioned in our previous Listener Male episode.
This is where you would find this artifact. There's is
supposed to be the stone um of the god Yes,
I believe, fed to chron Us in in lieu of

(29:42):
his own son Zeus, so that Zeus could could live
instead of being munched. Yeah. So this artifact found its
home there and it served as kind of the navel
of the world. But it was also the location of
this vital temple of Delphi where one might consult an
oracle about the future or the past. Uh. Now oracle
would be someone known as the Pythia, and this would

(30:04):
be a female conduit for the god Apollo. Uh, someone
serving as the oracle, and you would see people arrive
here from all over the essentially the known world, in
the regions surrounding Greece. Uh, they would pursue matters of
love state craft. You would have ambassadors showing up to
see to determine, like what course of action should be

(30:25):
taken at a at a state level or you know
what accounts for state level at the time. Businesses. Uh,
you know, if you have business inquiries, you might go
So a lot of people were coming in. You need
to find out if your son is going to depose
and kill you. Yeah, yeah, that sort of thing. Uh.
And there are various origin stories concerning the oracle here,
but the one which was given in the first century

(30:46):
BC by the writer uh Diodorus, was that a goat
discovered a cave and the fumes from the cave caused
him to become untethered from the now and to experience
both the future and the past, thus the establishment of
a temple and uh, you know, and arranging a particular
individual to to serve as the oracle, and providing an

(31:07):
orderly means for people to seek these sacred divinations. Okay,
So it seems like what you've got here is a
service that a lot of people are going to want
and they can't all get at the same time. Yeah,
And so you've got to manage that, so yeah, a
lot of people coming in. It becomes a major center
of banking and commerce. And I found a really interesting
book by an author by the by the name of

(31:28):
Michael Scott titled Delphi, a History of the Center of
the Ancient World published and as Scott explains, they turned
to a system of queuing. So I want to read
a quote from this book. Quote. The consultants, who would
have had to arrive, probably some days before the appointed
consultation day, would now play their part. They first had

(31:49):
to purify themselves with water from the springs of Delphi. Next,
they had to organize according to the strict rules governing
the order of consultation. Local Delphians always had the first
right of audience. What followed them was a system of
queuing that prioritize first Greeks whose city or tribe was
part of Delphi's supreme governing Council, then all other Greeks,

(32:10):
and finally non Greeks. But within each section there was
also a way to skip to the front, a system
known as promanteau promantea. The right to consult the oracle
before others could be awarded to individuals or cities by
the city of Delphi as an expression of the closer
relationship between them, or as thanks for particular actions as

(32:31):
oracle pre check exactly. Yeah, and so your city might
be awarded promantia, for instance, for paying for a new
altar or something to that effect. But but it's interesting.
It is kind of like a speed pass or one
of those. If you ever go to a place where
they have special parking places for the donors that that
helped fund a like a I don't know, performing arts
center or botanical garden, that's sort of things kind of

(32:52):
like that. But it also shows that for a very
long time, human civilization has had to work out how
to manage people as they move to and through various systems,
especially if it's something like this where there's there's only
the one oracle, like they can't see everybody at once.
You need a system in place and um and it.
But it's ultimately going to be more complicated than just

(33:13):
a first come, first serve, that's right. And this brings
us back to the idea that while the the single file,
first come, first serve line might feel like it, you know,
it might feel to us like it is so deep
and so obvious that's just a part of our biology.
Once again, it's something that is somewhat culturally and historically contingent,
and it's it's not something that was all that's always

(33:35):
in place everywhere in history. I was reading some articles
trying to find like where this convention really got popular,
and one thing I found was a number of articles
about a book by an author named David Andrews called
Why Does the Other Line Always Move Faster? That seems
like kind of a pop history of queuing. And Andrew's

(33:55):
argues at least that the first come, first serve, single
file queuing us system is mostly a recent phenomenon and
that it actually has its origins in the French Revolution. Uh.
He deduces this in part from the nineteenth century Scottish
historian and S. A. S. Thomas Carlyle, who wrote extensively
about the French Revolution in a three volume chronicle that

(34:17):
was first published in eighteen thirty seven. And one of
the things that Carlisle observed about post revolutionary France was
the change in modes of customer service. He said that
in their bakeries in Paris, customers would line up in
single file for service in what we're called queues q
meant tale in Old French, a tale like an animal's tale,

(34:41):
originally coming from the Latin coda or cauta, and quoted
in an ap article I was reading about this book, uh,
that there were basically political connotations to the idea of
waiting in queue for service. That it was supposed to
be a demonstration of commitment to the values of the
French revolutions logan of liberty, equality and fraternity. It meant

(35:03):
patiently waiting on your turn, you know, no matter what
your job was or your station. Uh. And and Carlisle
summed it up in the sentence, patriotism stands in Q. Yeah,
this is this is interesting how there are different ways
of looking at the line and the sort of the
democratic nature of the line, because again you'll also see

(35:23):
accusations of the line as a as a manifestation of socialism.
You'll see it critiqued. Uh. This was a common critique
of of the Soviet Union back that you're talking about
the bread lines and having to wait in line for bread. Uh,
you know, as if it were you know, it's a
sign of something not working within the institution. Well, I

(35:44):
think the problem there, like to the extent that that
is a problem. The problem there is scarcity, not the
fact that it's a first come, first serve system for access,
but like the line became emblematic of the scarcity, right,
And this actually leads, I think into a that's an
excellent lead into our discussion of queuing psychology, because yeah,
how do you perceive the line before you were in it?

(36:05):
How do you perceive the line once you are in it?
Because let's say you're you know, you're you're you're out
and about and you're like, oh, I think I'm going
to drop in at this coffee place. I'm gonna get
a cup of coffee. And as you approach, you see
that there is a long line or you know, a
longish line anyway to acquire said coffee. So how are
you supposed to view that? You could view it like saying,
oh good, they have a system. They have a system

(36:26):
for me to get coffee. I can go get in
line and I can totally acquire it. You know, maybe
it looks like the lines moving, or you might say,
oh man, there's a line. Maybe they're running out of coffee.
Maybe this is a scarity scarcity situation, or perhaps you're
concerned maybe they're understaffed, maybe they can't properly attend to
everybody who wants coffee today. You know. There there's so

(36:47):
many different ways of viewing it and um and certainly
when you start looking at the like the marketing research
on it, it is readily identified that there there's an
economic cost and a psychological cost to standing in line,
you know, because everybody in line that's waiting is somebody
that you you you generally have not yet um tended

(37:08):
to uh. You know. Granted you can have multiple line
system like the line to UM to to order and
then the line to get your food, etcetera. UM, but
there's a potential economic cost associated with that line, and
then there's a psychological cost. What is that individual doing
while they were waiting in line? Are they frustrated? Are
they are they angry? Are they at pulling out their
phones and going to one of the review sites so

(37:28):
they can you know, leave a nasty review because they
haven't received their coffee yet. Yeah, exactly. So a ton
of the psychological research about queuing has actually been done
in the context, like you say, of like marketing and
consumer behavior research and in the business world. But even
in that context, there's a lot of really interesting stuff
that's been found. Some of it, I think we'll ring

(37:50):
true to your experiences. Some of it might be more surprising.
One of the things that really rings true to my
experience is that people experience weights as longer and is
less pleasant when they don't know how long the weight
is going to be and they don't understand the reason
for the way that. That's like the real that's the

(38:10):
red zone. That's really bad. Yeah, I have to admit
the place that I got coffee this morning, though though
I love it it's a great place, is a similar
situation because there was no visible line to order, but
it was just a lot of people waiting on their
order outside and so a lot of the time. And
of course I went into it having read some of
these studies, so I was thinking a lot about our

(38:30):
recording today, um and maybe had a little extra AMMO
to to consider whilst waiting. But yeah, your mind starts wondering, Okay,
I wonder what's going on here? Man? Are they understaffed?
And you start looking at other people to see if
they're frustrated, and see how everyone is and and all.
Then you get suddenly in my case too I found
myself worrying, Oh man, I think I'm about to get

(38:52):
my coffee before these people who are here when I
got here? Is that going to feel weird? Because then
I'm sort of cutting in line. I mean not in
a way it where I bear the blame, but in
a way that could still be socially awkward. You know.
Oh well, this actually ties into one of the studies
I wanted to mention today. Do you mind if I
cut right to this one real quick? You're gonna kind
of ahead of me and the outline for this episode.

(39:13):
I want to cut in line on the outline just
because it ties into what you just said. Well, this
is going to be very brief. But one of the
questions I was wondering about is okay, so you just
assume you know what fairness in queuing is, right, because
when you see somebody like cutting in line, that is
obviously a violation of the fairness principle that you've got

(39:34):
in mind when you're when you're queuing up for something.
But there are other principles at work as well, And
so there was a study I was looking at by
Wrong Wrong Show and Deleep Soman in psychology and marketing,
in two thousand eight called consumers waiting in queues the
role of first order and second order justice. Uh. And
so this looks at actually two different senses of justice

(39:57):
about waiting in line. One is the sution is the
line being served according to a first in, first out principle,
I you know, in order, no cutting in line. And
the second principle is are people in line all waiting
approximately equal amounts of time? These two things are actually
not always coterminous, and sometimes they go against one another.

(40:20):
For example, if you're at a grocery store and somebody
has a you know, huge cart full of tiny items,
they're buying the entire spice rack off the shelf or something,
and they want to pay by check and they get
in front of you in line, you might have to
wait way more than the average customer. So that's one
type of unfairness you could perceive. But then, of course

(40:40):
the other thing would be, well, what if the store
just said like, well, why don't you come in front
of this person right? Uh, you know, even though they
got there before you. And so the authors looked into
the question here, do do customers care about both of
these things? They found that yes, people actually do care
about both of these types of fairness. But they also
found that customers care about adherence to the first in,

(41:03):
first out principle more than they care about the equal
waiting time principle. Ah So an individual with a large cart,
they're likely to take more offense that at the the
the person of the cash registers saying can we let
that person with one item go ahead of you? Um.
Whereas if it's a situation where you're approaching in your

(41:23):
large cart and they say, actually, the person who was
ahead of you had to go back and get an item,
but now they're back, can they go ahead in front
of you? Then that you would you would probably be
more okay with that because they were still ahead of
you in line. Sorry, that's a little confilution. No, No,
that may well be an implication. I mean, I don't
know how this would always come because once you introduce
real world scenarios that that like brings in some other things.

(41:45):
But yeah, I'd say in general that that kind of
principle could be true from this, Yeah, because there are
other social dynamics that come into play, right, Like if
you were a young, able bodied person with a large
cart and the person with one item is an elderly individual,
you know, then you're gonna perhaps be more inclined to
be like, oh, yes, please let let them go first. Yeah.

(42:05):
And I think in general, people feel very differently about
advantage that has been offered to someone else versus advantage
that has been given to someone else without your consent. Right,
the same person who would gladly let somebody with fewer
items in ahead of them in line if they if
it was their idea, might get really mad if the
if the clerk said, you know what, why don't why

(42:25):
doesn't this person go in front of you? Yeah? Yeah,
it wasn't my idea to let the like the weightlifter
who's buying one muscle milk go ahead of me, because
if I it was me, I'd be like, like, you know,
then then it's all right if I say, hey, why
don't you go ahead of me? You just got the
one thing, but you have the cash radder person. The
cash riders should be saying, wait, let the muscle milk
buy or go first. He has only the one muscle milk.

(42:47):
We must honor this. But then to come back to
our a t M example, the first in, first out
principle might devolve into the shoving principle, right, and I
don't want to shove with the muscle milk guy because
he's pretty jack than Now here's another interesting spending all
of this. So, how does the presence of a line

(43:09):
and our place in a line impact our perceived value
of the thing we're waiting in line for? Be that thing? Uh,
you know, it could be an experience who are waiting
to get on a line or or take a flight,
Or it could be an item we're buying. It could
be that cup of coffee that's scone, or that hot
dog what have you. So I was looking at an
article from ten titled a silver lining of standing in

(43:31):
line queuing increases value of products. This was published in
the Journal of Marketing Research by Minium Coup and uh
a lit fish back, and they point out that, first
of all, waiting in line obviously has both an economic
cost and a psychological cost. Like we said, long lines
can send the message that something is popular and in demand,
but lines can also impact customer UH satisfaction or impact

(43:55):
a business performance, and they point to several different studies
on this topic. They were particularly interested in the less
studied positive attributes of standing in line. So again, there's
no doubt that a line can send a signal about
the perceived value of the thing waiting at the end
of the line. But they wanted to know how the
experience of queuing affected expectations of enjoyment. This is interesting

(44:17):
because it makes me think about cases where somebody makes
certain instances of being willing to wait in line a
part of their sort of personal brand or identity. Like,
you know, you might be proud of the fact that
I waited overnight in line to be the first person
to get tickets to see the new Star Wars movie
or something, you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah, like

(44:39):
I am committing in a way, it's kind of like
proving like only someone this committed deserves to be first.
And uh, it's an interesting spent on the whole first
come first surf scenario. So the authors here they say, quote,
we propose that looking behind and perceiving real or illusionary
progress signals an increase in the product's value. As a result,

(45:00):
the consumer will not only expect to like, but also
actually like the product more and increase his or her expenditure.
So again, the idea is you're really looking forward to
buying that apple. But then the experience of waiting in
line and seeing people behind you in line that makes
the your anticipation of enjoyment of that apple even greater.

(45:21):
Oh yeah, it's got the seeing people behind you in line,
more and more people lining up behind you, that makes
you feel like, hey, yeah, I've really got in there
at the right time. Yeah. So this is of course
in line with the sunk cost effect which the author's site.
The more time and effort that I've sunk into something,
the more fixed I'm going to be on the idea
that this was worth it, even if I've been burned

(45:43):
in the past. So the thing you're waiting in line
for then becomes more valuable than it was when you
began waiting in line for it. So the study itself,
which is like a series of I think five studies total,
is relatively small, but the results are still interesting. And
I'm not going to get into the methods of each
one because you can imagine how they conducted this. They
had people stand in line and they uh and they

(46:03):
questioned them, and they manipulated things a little bit too
to see, you know, how people reacted uh, And it's
it's pretty obvious from the results what they did. So
Study one found that the perceived value of a bagel
sandwich increased in keeping with the absolute number of people
behind the individual in line. Okay, so you see more
people coming in behind you, you like your sandwich more

(46:24):
and more, right now. Study to found that you could
experiment with the number of people behind the individual in
line to increase the perceived value of the food sample,
but adjusting the number of people ahead had no measurable effect. Okay,
I don't know how exactly that shakes out with their method,
but that sounds to me like it might be not

(46:44):
so much to the fact that you had to wait
a certain amount of time to get something is what
increases the perceived value. But seeing other people wanting the thing,
as demonstrated by their being behind you in the line
and and making you think of yourself as towards the
front of the line increases the value. Yeah. Yeah, the

(47:04):
idea that there are more people behind you is important
and and I think also it gets into the idea
that the blind is moving. You know, I am no
longer last in line. So Study three and four drove
home that the more you increased focus on the people
behind an individual in line, the greater the perceived value
of the thing that we're waiting on. And I found
this especially interesting when I think about the various lines

(47:27):
I've stood in for, say, amusement park rides, because some
of them do kind of force you to realize how
many people are still behind you in line, but others
snake you through and interesting and novel ways put you through,
you know, novel surroundings. Um though sometimes in those you
still get a glance back. You occasionally get that moment
to look back and see where you were previously. And

(47:47):
I imagine, given the amount of design that goes into
you know, some of these major US amusement parks, that
is probably intended. There's probably some bit of research where
they're like, look, it's great to to to give people
the feeling that they're you know, touring a haunted museum
or something on their way to ride, but we also
need to remind them of how far they've come. Yeah,

(48:07):
So lines, if you've got a big serpentine line for
a ride, maybe you should wind it around one way
mirrors so the people towards the front of the line
can look back, but the people at the back can't.
Look ahead exactly. That seems like that would be very
much in keeping with this study, Like people need to
know that there are a lot of people behind them
in line. Uh, I guess the only the main time
you need I don't know if it's possible, but the

(48:29):
main time you would want to hide this from them
is if there are very few people behind them in line,
because that's when they're they're not going to there's not
going to be the benefit of this effect in place
that is a bad feeling. So we've been focusing on.
You know, obviously, businesses want to try to avoid discomfort
and displeasure coming from having to wait in line, because

(48:50):
it's generally understood correctly that most of the time waiting
in the line is unpleasant, people want to spend less
time doing it. But there can be times where the
line itself is kind of pleasurable, at least in my experience,
and it's when there's a line that moves very quickly. Uh.
You know, you get in a line and you just
zip right through it. I mean that almost kind of
feels good. Yeah, yeah, especially if your expectation is that

(49:13):
it will likely move slowly. Um. So yeah, there's always
that that point, or there's often that point. It's unfortunately
not always that point. There's often that point where you're like, oh, wow,
that that line moved pretty quickly, or or one that
I often find myself saying is oh, it looks like
we got here at the right time. That one, especially
if you you find yourself pretty far ahead in the
line or there are a lot of people behind you. Um,

(49:34):
then you you you kind of pat yourself in the back.
You're like, oh, yeah, hit it at the right time,
right before the lynch rush. I think I saw that
recently on a like meme list of things Dad say. Yeah, well,
you know, um, as a parent especially, you're always having
to put positive spins on a situation, UH, where that
the child may think it's the the end of the
world that you're waiting at all on anything, and you

(49:55):
have to say, well, hey, look look at the people
behind us. You know, look how far we've come, Look
how fast this line is moving, et cetera. Accentuate the positive.
So we'll probably get into this more in the next
part of the series, but one thing I wanted to
mention before we wrap up today is uh is one
example of the difference between objective weight times and perceived

(50:16):
weight times. Uh, they're just tons of studies that have
been done on all different kinds of things you can
do to make weight times in various forms of queuing
feel longer or shorter. Obviously, usually businesses want to find
ways to make them feel shorter. And a one strange
one I came across was a study by Steve Oakes
published in the Journal's Psychology and Marketing in two thousand

(50:40):
three called musical tempo and waiting perceptions. So you call
in for customer service on something, you're on the phone,
what what do they do while you're waiting on the phone.
Most of the time you get some music right right, yeah,
And if it's and if it's an episode of The Simpsons,
it will be something that is kind of cheekily connected
to the thing you're waiting on, right, oh yeah, Like

(51:00):
when they call in with the Krusty the clown doll
that's trying to kill Homer and it's singing everybody loves
the clown so why don't you? Um, Yeah, there's often
stuff like that, But you might wonder, Okay, what kind
of what kind of thought goes into choosing the music
that's that's on the line. I mean, maybe no thought.
It might just be random, who knows what different businesses do,
but there could be some actual research informing what the

(51:22):
musical selections are. Because this study found a real relationship
between people's satisfaction with weight times, and they're the perceived
duration of weight times based on how fast or slow
the music was the beats per minute. So the author
here did a thing that that was pretty clever instead

(51:44):
of having to instead of playing different, you know, selected
songs from popular music which people might already have associations
with that could screw things up. Instead, the author here
he used digital technology to play the same instrumental music
samples with and with variability by tempo, just to isolate

(52:06):
the variable of tempo and play basically the same songs
faster or slower and see how that would affect people's
perception of weight times. That they did this during UH
students having to wait on undergraduate registration for for a college.
And what the author found here was a significant positive
relationship between the tempo of the background music and the

(52:30):
perceived weight time. So what that means is slower tempo
music made people feel like the weight time was less
and faster tempo music made people feel like the weight
was going on longer, which is actually a little counterintuitive
to me. I might have assumed the opposite, but but
it it is sort of in keeping with the kind

(52:51):
of music I'm more often here when I'm waiting on
hold to get something, you know, I'm queuing on the telephone.
It's it's not usually they're not usually playing Moe her
Head right, you know. It's it's something it's very like
slow and languid. It's supposed to be relaxing sounding music.
I remember, uh, way back when we were when we
were owned by Discovery and we had to call in
for a meeting. There was some old music in the

(53:14):
waiting room for for our meeting software, and one of
the songs was something I called the Spanish Villa song. Oh.
It was kind of a Spanish guitar type thing. Yeah, yeah,
but it was very it was very like you know,
a nap on a sunny afternoon. Yeah. Yeah. And it
makes sense. I mean, I think it makes perfect sense
because I think of like a nice, fast tempo song.
I think of the BGS staying Alive, and like, that's

(53:36):
a song when you hear it, if you hear it
while you're walking. You were going to quicken your pace
and walk along with that song. It's a song that
makes you feel like you're getting stuff done, you're going
places in life. It is the complete opposite of what
waiting on hold feels like. So it it does seem
like like playing staying alive would be a terrible idea

(53:57):
for any kind of you know, on whole music situation. Yeah,
I guess you're right about that. I guess I just
wouldn't have thought that. But so there is a wrinkle
to this though, the effect of the music tempo on
perceived weight times is dependent on the objective length of
the weight time, so it breaks down like this. For

(54:17):
short weights defined in the study is between four and
fifteen minutes, slow music not only reduced perceived weight time,
it reduced perceived weight time below objective weight time. So
if you're waiting less than fifteen minutes, slow tempo music
on average actually made the weight feel shorter than it

(54:37):
actually was, whereas fast tempo music made it feel significantly
longer than that, and then the control with no music
made it feel even longer than the fast tempo music.
So no music was the worst condition of all interesting. Yeah. Yeah,
no music would be the worst, it seems, because then
you don't even know if you're on hold anymore, right,
Like the music lets me not even if the music

(54:59):
were were incorrect, if the music were like fast paced
and making it everything stretch out more, at least I
know that I'm still connected. Right. Oh that that's a
good point for telephone examples of this especially. Yeah. Um,
But so the interesting thing was the benefits of slow
tempo music over fast tempo music disappeared with longer waits.

(55:20):
So once you get into between eighteen and twenty five
minutes of waiting, Uh, suddenly the slow tempo music getting
any better than fast tempo music. Though maybe both conditions
of having music or a little bit better than no
music at all. Okay, makes sense? All right, Well, I
think we need to cut it there for part one,
but we're gonna be back in another part to talk

(55:42):
about all kinds of other things about queuing. Yeah. Now,
certainly if you have thoughts, go ahead and send them in,
though you know your experience with with waiting in line
and how they match up with some of what we've
discussed here. Uh, and yeah, join us for the next episode.
We will continue the journey in the meantime, If you
would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, you'll find them in the Stuff to
Blow Your Mind feed, which is the podcast feed you

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can find wherever you get your podcasts, wherever that happens
to be. We just asked you rate, review, and subscribe.
You can check out core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
Artifact on Wednesday, We've got a little listener mail for you.
On Mondays and Fridays, Is Weird How Cinema? Those are
the episodes where we don't really talk about the science
and the culture so much as we just talk about
some weird movie and maybe tying a little science and
culture if we want. But this is just our way

(56:25):
of closing out the week. Huge thanks as always to
our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would
like to get in touch with us with feedback on
this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for
the future, or just to say hello, you can email
us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

(56:48):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the iHeart
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FO