THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Dialog beneath a Inventive Commons license.
Many people have witnessed uncommon and even delinquent habits at an airport or on a flight. These could vary from benign acts corresponding to sleeping on the ground or doing yoga in entrance of the flight data show system to critical incidents like early morning drunken arguments and even making an attempt to open the airplane doorways mid-flight.
These extra sinister issues seem to have worsened over current years, with growing air rage incidents and flight diversions. Such incidents have led to calls to scale back and even ban the sale of alcohol at airports and on planes. RyanAir, for instance, has referred to as for a two-drink restrict at airport bars to cease drunken incidents on planes.
However what’s it about airports that make us behave otherwise? Let’s check out the psychology.
Many vacationers really feel that the journey begins on the airport, placing them in a unique state of mind than regular. They’re keen to start their one or two weeks’ of relaxed hedonism with a flourish.
Others, nevertheless, are anxious about flying, which can make them act out of character or take refuge in alcohol. The noise and crowds of airports doesn’t assist both. As the sphere of environmental psychology has demonstrated, human beings are very delicate to our speedy environment and may simply grow to be “overloaded” by stressors corresponding to crowds and noise.
Stress and anxiousness produce irritability, each on a short lived and ongoing foundation. People who find themselves typically anxious are extra vulnerable to anger. And a short lived anxious temper usually triggers indignant outbursts.
For my part, we additionally want to have a look at the airport from a psychogeographic perspective. Psychogeography research the impact of locations on individuals’s feelings and habits, notably city environments.
In Celtic cultures, there’s a idea of particular “skinny locations”—usually sacred groves or forests—the place the veil between the fabric and non secular world is skinny. In skinny locations, we’re between two realms, neither absolutely in a single place nor one other.
Within the trendy technological world, airports may also be seen as “skinny locations.” They’re liminal zones the place boundaries fade. On a literal degree, nationwide borders dissolve. As soon as we move via safety, we enter a no-man’s-land, between international locations. The idea of place turns into hazy.
In the same manner, time turns into a hazy idea at airports. About to step on a airplane, we’re in a liminal house between two time zones, about to leap ahead in time, and even head again into the previous. Some flights throughout the US—corresponding to Atlanta to Alabama—land sooner than departure time, as they cross time zones. Having the ability to handle our time provides us a way of management over our lives. Shedding this can be one other supply of tension.
In one other sense, airports are a zone of absence, the place the current second is unwelcome. Everybody’s consideration turns towards the longer term, to their flights and the adventures forward of them once they arrive at their vacation spot. This intense future focus usually brings frustration, particularly if flights are delayed.