Even Astronauts Get The Blues: Or Why Boredom Drives Us Nuts
March 15, 2016
http://www.npr.org/2016/03/14/470416797/even-astronauts-get-the-blues-or-why-boredom-drives-us-nuts
VEDANTAM: Richard Larson at MIT tells a story about how business passengers arriving on early morning flights into Houston were complaining about being bored as they waited for the conveyor belt to bring their bags. The airline company brought in consultants. They hired baggage handlers. They reduced the waiting time to eight minutes max. Nothing worked.
The complaints kept coming in. So the airline thought harder. Executives realized that business passengers were spending only a couple of minutes disembarking from the plane and six or seven minutes waiting in baggage claim. The solution, they moved the arrival gate further from baggage claim. Passengers now spend six or seven minutes walking to baggage claim and one or two minutes waiting for their bags. Poof, the complaints disappeared.
PINK: Extraordinary, I mean, this goes to – there’s a concept called occupied time, where if our time is occupied, we don’t feel a sense of distress. So we’ll take more occupied time instead of a shorter amount of time that isn’t occupied.