The Effects of Queue Structure on Attitudes

Abstract

Waiting is examined here as a psychological experience, through propositions regarding the relationship between the design of a queue and the emotions and attitudes of people waiting. Propositions are tested using a paradigm that both controls features of queue structure and allows collection of real-time data from people waiting. Data collected from 134 participants confirm that people closer to a service agent are more pleased than those further away. But people waiting in a single-queue structure are shown to feel more predictability and arousal than those waiting in a multiple-queue structure. Waiting in a multiple-queue structure is, however, shown to produce a sense of lack of justice, even when no objective inequalities exist. The study suggests a useful paradigm for evaluating alternative queue structures in a laboratory setting and provides insights about psychological aspects of waiting. Both the method and the results suggest an extensive agenda for future research.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 146 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.