Why the other queue moves faster

This must be one of the oldest questions humanity has asked of itself, with the exception, may be, of that other ancient cause for contemplation: why did the chicken cross the road? Whether or not we know the exact answer to the statement in our headline, we face it all the time. 

One chooses one’s queue in the supermarket with great care and strategic thought. One may place one’s spouse early on in the queue while one has made a quick dash to the vegetable section to hunt for snake gourd. One may count the number of folks ahead of one in each queue. One might even have gauged the contents in their trolleys or baskets.

But no matter how much care you exercise in choosing the queue with only four customers ahead when the others have seven or more, you may still be frustrated. The lady ahead might have specialised in picking items without price tags, and the clerk has to call the supervisor thrice for help.

Or the gentleman ahead is in deep argument with the clerk about his right to pay for a Rs13 candy bar with a credit card. Or the clerk is confused between a box of candles and Canderel and has to go back to the third floor to check out the difference. If it’s none of the above, the clerk may yet choose the exact moment you reach the counter to put the ‘Closed’ sign and head for lunch. This happens, no matter which queue you choose.

If one assumes that all supermarkets, airport security or railway reservation counters have three or more queues, you may not be alone in thinking that the other queue is moving faster. It may well be a fact. In the absence of a god dedicated to queues, on an average there is no reason for any particular queue to move faster or slower than any other. If so, why does our queue move the slowest?

The reason is this: Of any three queues anywhere, any one of them is equally likely to be the slowest or the fastest. Thus, irrespective of which queue you are in, there is a one-third probability that yours is the slowest queue, implying a two-thirds probability that the other two queues are faster than yours, leaving you fretting. But this also means that at least once in three times, your queue should be the fastest.

Well, we all suffer from what behavioural economists call
observational bias. We tend to compare ourselves — particularly when we are unhappy with our lot — with those who are better off. Thus, we compare ourselves with the other queues only when we are frustrated with the delay in our own. Now we know that losses or frustration loom larger than profits or happiness (See this
column, August 28, 2010) of the same magnitude. That’s why, we tend to remember painful experiences much more than pleasurable ones. Maybe that’s the reason the frustration over the slow movement of our queue in one-third of the instances stings more than the pleasure we may receive from fast movement of our queue in the other one-third of instances.

Maybe, the above phenomenon is also spiked with the peak-end effect (see this column, October 9, 2010). The peak-end effect ensures that the peak of frustration looms larger than the peak of pleasures from faster queues in the past.

There is also something else at play here, namely, the tendency to ‘ignore the misses but count the hits’, which also tells us, for example, why we are often impressed with the “accurate” predictions of astrologers. Astrological predictions are often broad generalisations, leaving ample scope for interpretations to predictions like these: “You are very likely to get a promotion this year.” If you are a believer in astrology and don’t get that promotion, you ignore the failed prediction, but when you do get your promotion, it reinforces your faith in astrology!

In other words, our mind accepts what is convenient and
ignores what is not, so that the sample of experiences from which we draw our conclusions is usually biased.