为什么排队是一种折磨？
Why Waiting Is Torture

SOME years ago, executives at a Houston airport faced a troubling customer-relations issue. Passengers were lodging an inordinate number of complaints about the long waits at baggage claim. In response, the executives increased the number of baggage handlers working that shift. The plan worked: the average wait fell to eight minutes, well within industry benchmarks. But the complaints persisted.

几年前，休斯顿机场的管理人员为严峻的客户关系所困扰。乘客登记了大批意见反馈，称领取行李的等待时间太长。为解决这一问题，管理人员增加了行李搬运工来轮班工作。这个办法凑效了：等待的平均时间被缩短到8分钟，低于同行业标准。但不满意见却还在一直持续。

Puzzled, the airport executives undertook a more careful, on-site analysis. They found that it took passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim and seven more minutes to get their bags. Roughly 88 percent of their time, in other words, was spent standing around waiting for their bags.

机场管理人员十分迷惑，并进行了一次更为细致的现场分析。他们发现乘客从到达入口到行李领取处需步行一分钟，等待行李需七分钟。换句话说，这期间他们有88%的时间是在站着等行李。

So the airport decided on a new approach: instead of reducing wait times, it moved the arrival gates away from the main terminal and routed bags to the outermost carousel. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. Complaints dropped to near zero.

所以机场决定采取新办法：他们没有缩短等待时间，而是转而将到达入口从主航站楼挪出去，并把行李转运到最外围的传送带上。现在乘客领取行李所需的步行时间增加了五倍。但却几乎不再抱怨。

This story hints at a general principle: the experience of waiting, whether for luggage or groceries, is defined only partly by the objective length of the wait. “Often the psychology of queuing is more important than the statistics of the wait itself,” notes the M.I.T. operations researcher Richard Larson, widely considered to be the world’s foremost expert on lines. Occupied time (walking to baggage claim) feels shorter than unoccupied time (standing at the carousel). Research on queuing has shown that, on average, people overestimate how long they’ve waited in a line by about 36 percent.

这个故事说明了一个普遍规律：不论是等行李还是等着买东西，等待过程的感受都只在一定程度上取决于实际等待时间的长短。麻省理工大学(M.I.T.)运筹学研究员理查德·拉森(Richard Larson)认为，“排队心理通常比等待时间本身更重要。”他被广泛认为是世界上最重要的排队研究专家。被占用的时间（步行到行李领取处）会让人感觉到比空闲时间（站在传送带前）要短。关于排队的研究显示，人们对自己等待的时间会高估36%。

This is also why one finds mirrors next to elevators. The idea was born during the post-World War II boom, when the spread of high-rises led to complaints about elevator delays. The rationale behind the mirrors was similar to the one used at the Houston airport: give people something to occupy their time, and the wait will feel shorter. With the mirrors, people could check their hair or slyly ogle other passengers. And it worked: almost overnight, the complaints ceased.

电梯旁装镜子也是同样道理。这个主意最早出现在第二次世界大战之后的婴儿潮时期，当时由于高楼的大范围出现而引发了人们对电梯延误抱怨不已。装镜子的原理与休斯顿机场的做法类似：让人们在等待期间有事可做，这样他们就会觉得等待时间没那么久。电梯乘客可以在镜子面前审视自己的头发，或者偷窥别人。这招也很凑效：几乎一夜之间，抱怨就停止了。

The drudgery of unoccupied time also accounts in large measure for the popularity of impulse-buy items, which earn supermarkets about $5.5 billion annually. The tabloids and packs of gum offer relief from the agony of waiting.

排队等待带来的无聊很大程度上导致了人们购买冲动消费品，这每年都给超市带来约55亿美元的收入。八卦报刊和一包包口香糖让等待变得不那么痛苦。

Our expectations further affect how we feel about lines. Uncertainty magnifies the stress of waiting, while feedback in the form of expected wait times and explanations for delays improves the tenor of the experience.

期望值会进一步影响人们对排队的感觉。不确定性会放大等待的压力，所以明确要等待的时间，并解释拖延的原因则会改善人们对等待的感觉。

And beating expectations buoys our mood. All else being equal, people who wait less than they anticipated leave happier than those who wait longer than expected. This is why Disney, the universally acknowledged master of applied queuing psychology, overestimates wait times for rides, so that its guests — never customers, always guests — are pleasantly surprised when they ascend Space Mountain ahead of schedule.

预计的等待时间变短会使人们的情绪高涨。在其他条件不变的情况下，等待时间比预计更短的人在离开时，比那些等待时间比预计更久的人表现得要更快乐。这也就是为什么迪士尼(Disney)，这个被所有人认为是掌控等待心理的大师，总会多估等待时间，这样当客人（他们从来不是顾客，总是客人）发现自己比预计时间更早到达飞越太空山时会感到惊喜。

This is a powerful ploy because our memories of a queuing experience, to use an industry term, are strongly influenced by the final moments, according to research conducted by Ziv Carmon, a professor of marketing at the business school Insead, and the behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman. When a long wait ends on a happy note — the line speeds up, say — we tend to look back on it positively, even if we were miserable much of the time. Conversely, if negative emotions dominate in the final minutes, our retrospective audit of the process will skew toward cynicism, even if the experience as a whole was relatively painless.

这是个强大的策略，因为人们对排队的记忆，用专业语言来说，总是受到最后一刻的极大影响，一项由英思雅德(Insead)商学院市场学教授齐夫·卡蒙(Ziv Carmon)和行为经济学家丹尼尔·卡内曼 (Daniel Kahneman)共同开展的研究称。当一次漫长的等待在最后时刻以快乐终结时（比如说排队速度加快），即使大部分时间里，等待都令人沮丧，最后我们对这次排队经历的回忆也会比较好。反过来，如果我们在最后几分钟情绪低落，即使整个等待过程相对来说并不难受，最后我们对整个排队过程的回忆也会趋向不满。

Professors Carmon and Kahneman have also found that we are more concerned with how long a line is than how fast it’s moving. Given a choice between a slow-moving short line and a fast-moving long one, we will often opt for the former, even if the waits are identical. (This is why Disney hides the lengths of its lines by wrapping them around buildings and using serpentine queues.)

此外，卡蒙教授和卡内曼教授还发现，我们更关心的是排的队伍有多长，而不是队伍行进的速度。如果眼前有一个行进速度较慢但却较短的队伍，和一个行进速度很快但却较长的队伍时，即使两者所需的时间一样，通常我们也会跟愿意选择前者。（这也是为什么迪士尼的队列总是弯弯绕绕的，并通过绕过建筑物，来隐藏队伍长度。）

Perhaps the biggest influence on our feelings about lines, though, has to do with our perception of fairness. When it comes to lines, the universally acknowledged standard is first come first served: any deviation is, to most, a mark of iniquity and can lead to violent queue rage. Last month a man was stabbed at a Maryland post office by a fellow customer who mistakenly thought he’d cut in line. Professor Larson calls these unwelcome intrusions “slips” and “skips.”

或许影响人们排队感受的最重要因素是公平感。普遍被认可的排队准则是先到先得：对大多数人来说，任何违反这个原则的行为都不公平，还会引发排队者的暴怒。上月，一名男子在马里兰一家邮局内被另一名顾客刺伤，因为行凶者误认为该男子要插队。拉森教授称这些不受欢迎的入侵行为是“加塞”或者“跳排”。 The demand for fairness extends beyond mere self-interest. Like any social system, lines are governed by an implicit set of norms that transcend the individual. A study of fans in line for U2 tickets found that people are just as upset by slips and skips that occur behind them, and thus don’t lengthen their wait, as they are by those in front of them.

人们对公平的要求不仅仅局限于自身利益。就像其他任何社会体系一样，排队也受一套超越个人的、不成文的规则约束。一项对等待购票的U2粉丝的研究发现，人们对于自己身后和身前的“加塞”或“跳排”现象同样不满，虽然在身后加塞并不会延长他们自己的等待时间。

Surveys show that many people will wait twice as long for fast food, provided the establishment uses a first-come-first-served, single-queue ordering system as opposed to a multi-queue setup. Anyone who’s ever had to choose a line at a grocery store knows how unfair multiple queues can seem; invariably, you wind up kicking yourself for not choosing the line next to you moving twice as fast.

很多调查显示，如果快餐店不采纳多个队伍一起排队的方法，而是按照先来后到顺序，只排一队等餐的话，很多人会花上两倍的时间来排队。任何在超市里选择过要排哪一队的人都知道，多个队伍一起排看起来有多么不公平；通常，人们都会满怀自责的看着旁边那条行进速度快得多的队伍。

But there’s a curious cognitive asymmetry at work here. While losing to the line at our left drives us to despair, winning the race against the one to our right does little to lift our spirits. Indeed, in a system of multiple queues, customers almost always fixate on the line they’re losing to and rarely the one they’re beating.

但还有一种认知不平衡的情况是我们无法解释的。如果自己所在的队伍的排队速度输给旁边队伍的话，人们就会感到绝望，而速度超过旁边队伍却不能让人感到快乐。的确，在多队同排的情况下，顾客总会一直盯着速度比自己快的队伍，而很少关注比自己慢的队伍。

Fairness also dictates that the length of a line should be commensurate with the value of the product or service for which we’re waiting. The more valuable it is, the longer one is willing to wait for it. Hence the supermarket express line, a rare, socially sanctioned violation of first come first served, based on the assumption that no reasonable person thinks a child buying a candy bar should wait behind an old man stocking up on provisions for the Mayan apocalypse.

公平感也要求排队的长度要和产品或服务的价值相匹配。价值越大，人们就越愿意去等。所以超市里的特快通道，虽然违反了先来后的顺序，但却极少受到社会指责，就是基于这样的假设：没有一个理智的人会认为，一个只买了糖果的孩子应该排在那个为世界末日到来而储备物资的老头后面。

Americans spend roughly 37 billion hours each year waiting in line. The dominant cost of waiting is an emotional one: stress, boredom, that nagging sensation that one’s life is slipping away. The last thing we want to do with our dwindling leisure time is squander it in stasis. We’ll never eliminate lines altogether, but a better understanding of the psychology of waiting can help make those inevitable delays that inject themselves into our daily lives a touch more bearable. And when all else fails, bring a book.

美国人每年要花370亿个小时在排队上。排队等待最主要的代价是情绪负担：压力、无聊，以及那种浪费生命的感觉。现在休闲时间越来越少，我们最不愿意的就是把它浪费在停滞中。我们永远都无法根除排队现象，但更好地理解排队心理，却多少可以让我们更好地忍受那些日常生活中不可避免的等待。如果一切都不行，那就带本书吧。

亚历克斯·斯通(Alex Stone)是《愚弄胡迪尼：魔术师、读心术士、数学怪才以及心灵的隐秘力量》(Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks and the Hidden Powers of the Mind)一书的作者。

翻译：张明明