Each morning, Jeremy Cooper descended the stairs to the subway station at 110th Street and went through a routine familiar to millions of New Yorkers: He’d peer down the black abyss of the subway tracks to see if he could spot the next train coming.
If he didn’t see a train right away, he’d make periodic checks down the tracks every few minutes. Or maybe every minute. Or maybe it was every 30 seconds.
“Statistically, my average wait was four minutes,” says Cooper, a co-founder and partner of real estate firm Cooper and Cooper. “Once it got to be more than four minutes, I would get upset and then more upset.”
Now that the Metropolitan Transit Authority has installed “countdown clocks” at 165 subway stops, the days of aggressive leaning are over (mostly). The clocks have tapped into something that psychologists have known for years: Humans are ridiculously, ludicrously, unjustifiably impatient.
Particularly that subspecies of human known as New Yorkers.
“Patience is a virtue, until it’s not,” says Stephanie Wang, assistant professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh, who has studied consumer patience. “Patience may not be beneficial in certain societies due to the institutions in place. In some situations, displaying patience may be flouting a social norm.”
New Yorkers are part of what Tel Aviv University psychology professor Dan Zakay calls a “temponomic” culture (from “time” and “economics”). Temponomic cultures value acting more than reflecting. To us time is literally money, and every second counts.
When people in a temponomic society are made to wait, we instinctively focus on the fact that we’re waiting; and the ensuing hyper-awareness of time causes our internal clocks to go haywire.
In studies Zakay and others have performed, three different groups of people were asked to judge the amount of time elapsed in a certain period. During the fixed period of time, one group was given a complex task, another was given a simple task, and the third was given nothing to do at all.
Unsurprisingly, people in the idle group heavily overestimated the amount of time they were left twiddling their thumbs. They had allocated so much attention to time — literally “keeping” and “watching” time — that their stress and aggression started to skyrocket.
This is why, incidentally, your credit card company plays hold music when you call and why your computer will tell you how many more minutes you’ll have to wait before that program you want is completely downloaded, Zakay says. Software designers got wise to our impatience long before the MTA did.
“Impatience reflects emotional and mental stress,” Zakay says, emphasizing that everything from uncertainty (when is that train getting here?) to unfulfilled expectations (the tunnel is never this crowded at this hour!) heightens stress.
MTA officials said cultivating patience was not the goal of the countdown clocks, rather it was “convenience.” But now that it is an established side effect, transportation officials should be warned: When it comes to patience, tampering with people’s expectations is even more stressful than waiting.
“The efficiency of the system is dependent on its accuracy,” Zakay said. “If trains do not come on time, and the clocks stop being a predicting cue on which one can count, the situation might become worse.”
Researchers have tried to determine why some people — no matter where they live — seem to be in possession of more patience than others, but the answer is elusive. Part of the problem is that nobody is really “patient” or “impatient” all the time. Someone who exhibits a Buddha-like calm while in rush hour traffic might go nuts if another person cuts in line in front of them at the store.
The effects of cities on people’s patience is on one hand quite obvious: With so much stimuli bombarding city folk, we have to be quicker and more selective about what warrants attention, said Edward Krupat, director of evaluation for Harvard Medical School and author of “People in Cities: The Urban Environment and Its Effects.”
“Urban behavior is the property of a person-in-environment system and not an attribute of a person,” he writes. In other words, when in Rome, we truly do as the Romans do.
At the same time, city-dwellers are a self-selected group. Krupat, who was born and raised in New York, acknowledges that there is a fundamental difference between “city people” and “non-city people.”
“How much of patience is nature and how much is nurture is somewhat obvious. It’s a mixture of both,” Wang says. “Perhaps each individual starts out with a range from minimum to maximum level of patience. The environment can move the level around within this range.”
In fact, Krupat has a friend from Kansas who now lives in Washington, DC. When visiting him, Krupat marveled that the friend drives as aggressively as everyone else there. He’s still the same guy. But thanks to city life, he’s now also a guy with a lot less time on his hands and a slightly altered sense of “normal” behavior.
“He said, ‘After getting rear-ended twice, I had to learn to do things differently.’ ”