Why do some travelers squabble about overhead bin space? Or feud over an armrest? Why, when a passenger reclines his seat, does another respond with rage befitting the pages of Lord of the Flies?
What makes rational travelers like you and me suddenly explode?
One of the most obvious catalysts is, of course, a crowded cabin. Many seats are thinner and narrower than in the past, and planes like some 777s, which used to have only nine seats across in coach, now cram 10 across.
Photo: EPA
“When you crowd people together, there is a point at which they are no longer able to function appropriately,” said Leon James, a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii who has studied road and air rage. Crowding breeds feelings of alienation, cynicism and anonymity. It leads, as James put it, to “a breakdown of ordinary social inhibitions” — such as controlling one’s explosive emotions.
ANTISOCIAL AIRPLANES
Planes today are, in a word, antisocial, he said. Little wonder that people recline their seats without a friendly warning. “They just do it,” said James, adding that it’s a sign of “impersonal hostility among passengers,” an atmosphere “created by the airlines by the way they manage the passengers.”
Photo: EPA
Most airlines don’t encourage social cabin environments. Rather, he said, their service changes have reinforced the hostile climate. By increasing fees for checked bags, passengers on a budget have had to compete for overhead bin space. By eliminating hot meals in coach, travelers have resorted to carrying on their own sometimes odoriferous food at the expense of their seatmates’ noses.
I find myself thinking of John B. Calhoun’s seminal overpopulation research, published in Scientific American in the 1960s, which found that as rats were increasingly crowded together, they became ever more aggressive and exhibited “behavior disturbances” from “frenetic overactivity” to “pathological withdrawal.”
In a congested plane, it’s not just other passengers from whom we feel estranged, though.
“You feel a distance from your sense of self,” said Emma Seppala, the associate director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
“You lose self-awareness,” she continued, referring to one interpretation of a psychological theory known as deindividuation, “and it’s been shown to lessen rationality.”
The cabin is perhaps the most glaring environmental factor contributing to air rage, but there’s also the theater of getting to the airport and checking in: stop-and-go traffic, the obstacle course of suitcases on the curb, noise bouncing off the terminal walls, snail-like security lines, endless pings from your smartphone as work e-mails continue to land even as you remove your shoes and shove them into an X-ray machine.
Many people feel overtaxed and depleted, especially when traveling, and “that really impacts our self-control and willpower,” Seppala said.
SELF-CONTROL FAILURE
Self-control, however, is not a neat, unitary concept. It’s not as if some people have it and some people don’t.
“There are multiple ways to fail at self-control,” all supported by different brain circuits,“ said Joshua W. Buckholtz, an assistant professor in the department of psychology and center for brain science at Harvard. ”As it turns out, self-control is this heterogeneous construct, and we’re only now beginning to parse it and understand what these distinct faculties are.”
What we do know is that certain things can affect our capacity for self-control, particularly stress and sleep deprivation — which tend to be as much a part of travel as luggage.
“Sleep deprivation can play a really important role in making people act much more emotional,” said Iris Mauss, an associate professor in the department of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. A study by her colleague Matthew Walker, director of the university’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory, found that “without sleep, the brain had reverted back to more primitive patterns of activity,” he said in a news release, “in that it was unable to put emotional experiences into context and produce controlled, appropriate responses.”
There’s plenty the airlines could be doing, too (aside from configuring planes with seats that actually fit their ticket holders). For example: Improve the cabin atmosphere.
“They have to think of the crowd as a potential community,” said James of the University of Hawaii, and enact certain community-building principles. One simple tactic is what he refers to as live demography: a flight attendant standing in front of the cabin asking questions like “How many of you are going home?” or “Raise your hand if you’ve never been on an airplane before.” It may sound like a kindergarten exercise, but it encourages passengers to relax, be friendly and communicate with one another.
“It breaks the anonymity and the hostility,” James said.
Airline personnel also need to be trained, or better trained, to be more compassionate in how they handle people, he said, be it demonstrating sympathy when problems arise or simply being specific when asked about delays, saying “20 minutes” instead of just “a few more minutes,” which creates uncertainty and increases frustration.
“The airlines have to learn how to help people cope,” he said. “If they don’t, it’s going to get a lot worse.”
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