Why people get up from their airplane seats before you can say ‘touchdown’
You probably have been in this scenario: your plane lands, and as soon as the fasten-your-seatbelt signs are turned off, everyone gets up from their seats. The airplane doors are still closed and will be for another 15 minutes before you can get off, yet here you are: half-standing, half-sitting, breathing in someone’s neck while trying not to sweat and waiting for those doors to finally open.
Why is it that people don’t stay seated until the doors are opened, and their respective seating row is ready to offboard the plane? Perhaps you recall we had this rule during Covid; for a brief period, there was an onboard instruction that you had to stay seated until you row is called for — and get up only when it was your turn.
The human brain is a funny place. We tend to engage in irrational behaviour all the time. From ‘saying A but doing B’, to unexpected impulsive actions, to hurting people we love for no reason, we surely have some human traits that don’t seem to be rationally explained in a straightforward way. That makes us interesting creatures; rather than always acting in the most logical and predictable way, we like to spice it up a bit and following our instincts, emotions, and impulses.
Influencing the product-service system
I think that premature airplane off-boarding falls in that latter category. Call it a lack of patience, the need to continue our journey, or just got restless from sitting for too long, we want to stand up.
What’s more, it seems we have an innate drive to have the feeling we are progressing while we are not, in reality. Compare it to hitting the elevator button 10x instead of one, hoping that will make it arrive faster. Or honking in a traffic jam in the hope the cars in front of you magically disappear. You take an action of which you know will have no effect on the system (or at least very little). It just makes us ‘feel good’. We aim to influence the system, but we can’t. I know a person that would shake her iPhone when the internet was too slow, hoping it would speed up. Although not helping her to get faster internet, for a minute she thinks it just might help a bit.
This is a great example of ‘perceived control’, or ‘the degree to which they believe that they have control over themselves and the place’. In this case of our airplane example, this means that people act in a certain way to perceive they have more control, without really having it.
Additionally, the ‘Goal Gradient Hypothesis’ by Kivetz, Urminsky, and Zheng, explain that as we near a goal, our efforts to achieve it, intensify. The closer we get to deplaning, the more urgent our actions become — even if those actions are ultimately futile. We just try harder as we see the end goal nearing. That’s the hard reality of our reptile brain and another example of how we act irrationally.
What can we learn from this?
What can we learn from this, apart from sitting our asses down longer after the plane lands?
That system feedback is crucial: let users know if, and how, they can influence a product or service. In the example of slow internet, that is sometimes solved with ‘skeleton loading elements,’ imitating screen activity and reassuring the user ‘something is happening’ in the background. In the case of the airplane offboarding, one could nudge people to sit down for longer by showing the offboarding status in real-time, indicating if doors are open or closed, which row is currently offboarding, and how much minutes it will take before it’s your row’s turn.
Reassure users; provide system feedback
The problem of people standing up in an airplane is not a big one and is a symptom of the mere fact that we’re all human, and as such act irrationally from time to time.
However, it’s a nice small example of ways we try to influence a product-service system without having the power to do so. As designers and product builders, the only thing we can really do is make the system’s status clear and provide appropriate feedback when possible. By providing clear, timely feedback to passengers, we can perhaps make the end of the flight as calm and organized as the beginning.
