IELTS Practice Test 6

Reading Passage: Why Waiting Feels Longer

Few everyday experiences are as widely disliked as waiting, and few are so poorly measured by the people doing it. When the Corran Transport Research Unit asked 2,400 commuters to estimate how long they had stood on a platform, and then checked their answers against station camera footage, the typical estimate was about a third longer than the real wait, and waits at bus stops, which the unit also examined, showed much the same pattern. For psychologists, this gap between clock time and felt time is the interesting part: if a wait can feel longer than it is, perhaps it can also be made to feel shorter.

Dr Lena Hartigan's work begins from the observation that unoccupied time drags. In a series of trials in office buildings, she found that complaints about slow lifts fell sharply after mirrors were fitted in the lobbies, although the lifts themselves were no faster; people looking at their reflections simply noticed the delay less. She has also shown that displays counting down the minutes to the next train reduce frustration, because passengers know how long the wait will last.

Professor Kofi Mensah-Boateng is less interested in how long a queue feels than in whether it seems fair. In supermarkets with a separate line for each till, he observed, shoppers constantly compare their progress with the line beside them and conclude, more often than not, that they chose badly. When one store replaced its separate lines with a single winding queue feeding every till, customers rated the experience more highly, even though their average wait was slightly longer than before. In his view, a short wait that seems unjust can cause more irritation than a long one that seems orderly.

For Dr Yuki Tanabe, the worst wait is an unexplained one. Passengers on a train held outside a station for ten minutes without an announcement, her surveys suggest, are far angrier than those held for the same time after being told the cause. Tanabe also argues that the final moments of a wait carry particular weight: a queue that speeds up at the end tends to be remembered more kindly than one that moves at a steady pace throughout.

Taken together, these findings suggest that many organisations may be spending in the wrong place. Adding staff or vehicles to shave a minute off a wait is expensive; a mirror, a clear announcement or a single queue costs comparatively little. Yet the psychology of waiting has its limits. Where waits are genuinely excessive, making them feel shorter is no substitute for making them shorter, and customers who discover that they have been managed rather than helped are unlikely to be grateful.