Farewell to Arms
Fly often? If you do, who gets the arm rest? You? Or your neighbor?
Good afternoon, this is your captain speaking. We are at cruising altitude and will be in flight for another three hours, so you’d better get comfortable.
That means figuring out who gets the arm rest — you, or your neighbor in the next seat. Oh, I know the seats are built so that one arm rest is shared by two passengers. Sure, we could have given all the seats their own arm rests, but then airplane flights would be so much less interesting from a social psychology point of view. And hey — you don’t really mind, do you?
Turns out you do. In a study conducted by three social psychologists, 426 pairs of people were observed on some twenty flights to see if there is a pattern to who gets the disputedarmrest. The subjects observed were always one male seated next to one female. Guess who got the armrest most of the time?
Yep, the men. Twice as often? Three times? Try five times as often. Men dominated the social space that didn’t clearly belong to either person. Adjusting the experiment to only include people of equal size, that number dropped. But the men still took the arm rest three times as often as the women.
In post-flight interviews, 68 percent of the men said they were bothered when the other person took the armrest, while only 42 percent of the women felt annoyed.
So…are all men just pushy cads? Well, one can debate what these data show. But this much is clear: that little strip of plastic is a mini-battleground.
譯文:
扶手爭(zhēng)奪戰(zhàn)
下午好,我是機(jī)長(zhǎng)。我們現(xiàn)在正處于巡航高度,還會(huì)飛行3個(gè)小時(shí),希望你旅途愉快。
這意味著誰(shuí)將會(huì)得到扶手-你或者你旁邊的鄰居。噢,我知道椅子這樣設(shè)計(jì)就是為了讓兩個(gè)乘客共用一個(gè)扶手。當(dāng)然,我們可以給所有的座位配有自己?jiǎn)为?dú)的扶手,但是從社會(huì)心理學(xué)的角度看,飛機(jī)航班就會(huì)減少很多樂趣。所以你不會(huì)介意的是吧?
實(shí)際上你很介意。3名社會(huì)心理學(xué)家對(duì)20架航班上的426對(duì)乘客關(guān)于誰(shuí)應(yīng)該得到飽受爭(zhēng)議的扶手進(jìn)行了研究,觀察的對(duì)象一般是坐在女性旁邊的男性。猜猜是誰(shuí)大部分時(shí)間使用扶手?
是的,男性。有兩倍?還是三倍?恐怕是五倍。男性主宰著這個(gè)沒有明確歸屬的社會(huì)空間。如果把實(shí)驗(yàn)面向相同體型的人,這個(gè)數(shù)據(jù)將會(huì)下降。盡管如此,男性使用扶手的頻率仍然是女性的三倍。
在飛行后的采訪中,68%的男性表示他們?yōu)閯e人霸占扶手而感到煩惱,而女性只有42%有此同感。
那么,是不是所有男性都如此不紳士呢?你可以質(zhì)疑這些數(shù)據(jù)顯示的結(jié)果,但是有一點(diǎn)是不容質(zhì)疑的:小小的塑料扶手已成為了一個(gè)爭(zhēng)奪戰(zhàn)場(chǎng)。