United Airlines & The ‘Electrocution’ Of Passengers

When a survey of PSFK readers I conducted said that 75% of you think that a ‘helpful’ inflight staff is an attribute of a great airline – why, in our experience, do airlines still seem to fail to provide the simplest of services? In this opinion piece I try to theorize about airlines’ group-hate of passengers and the strategic problem fueling it.

A particularly painful flight(s) I took recently (partly documented on Facebook here and here) on United Airlines reminded me of the controversial experiment by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1961. The Milgram experiment involved ‘teachers’ who would give their ‘learners’ electric shocks if they got answers wrong in a word-pairing game. What the experiment showed was that the ‘teacher,’ assuming that they were on the side of authority, would administer levels of shock that they had been told were far beyond dangerous.I’m sure many of you will remember hearing about this experiment when you read through this extract that describes it in Wikipedia:

Three people take part in the experiment: “experimenter”, “learner” (”victim”) and “teacher” (participant). Only the “teacher” is an actual participant, i.e. unaware about the actual setup, while the “learner” is a confederate of the experimenter. The participant and the learner were told by the experimenter that they would be participating in an experiment helping his study of memory and learning in different situations.

… The “teacher” was given an electric shock from the electroshock generator as a sample of the shock that the “learner” would supposedly receive during the experiment. The “teacher” was then given a list of word pairs which he was to teach the learner. The teacher began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and read four possible answers. The learner would press a button to indicate his response. If the answer was incorrect, the teacher would administer a shock to the learner, with the voltage increasing in 15-volt increments for each wrong answer. If correct, the teacher would read the next word pair.

The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After the confederate was separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electroshock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level. After a number of voltage level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would cease.

At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.

…Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled fourteen Yale University senior-year psychology majors as to what they thought would be the results. All of the poll respondents believed that only a few (average 1.2%) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock.

In Milgram’s first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40) of experiment participants administered the experiment’s final 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment, some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment. Only one participant steadfastly refused to administer shocks before the 300-volt level.

Basically, the ‘teachers’ were conditioned, very quickly, to believe that it was okay to mistreat the ‘learners’. After sitting under the ‘care’ of United Airlines for 10 hours on three flights it was rather easy to make a connection between my travel experience and the experiment administered almost fifty years earlier.

Airline staff seem to have developed the same level of ambivalence towards passengers as the ‘teachers’ had for ‘learners’. There is a group-attitude among staff that it’s okay to be unhelpful and even spiteful towards their customers. I sensed that United Airlines staff had the right to metaphorically electrocute their passengers because it was deemed by them as acceptable behavior.

Which is strange because I’d guess that a vast majority of airline staff are “good” people – or at least think so. At home, in their community, with their friends they probably are good to people – it’s just when they slip on that uniform and go into the airport building that their behavior changes.

That change must be the reason why the customer service rep in Dulles thought he was doing me a favor when I had to find a flight to New Orleans via Chicago because my La Guardia originated flight was delayed and I missed my connecting flight (66% of PSFK readers surveyed thought “Getting there on time” was an attribute of a great airline). That change must be the reason why there’s a lack of back seat entertainment in US planes (87%). That change must be the reason why the in-flight attendant shouted at the woman who was anxious about missing a connecting flight. That change must be why they told my wife to get to the point when she was trying to explain why she thought her luggage hadn’t caught up with her. That change must be why the planes I flew were dirty (76% of readers think great airlines have clean planes). That change must be why the attendant flying between La Guardia and Dulles couldn’t consider walking the aisle with a bottle of water and glasses or why there were no snacks on any of the flights I traveled (51%). That change must be the reason only one customer service rep was available for a line of over forty passengers who had missed their connection in Chicago or that the reason why the board by my gate indicated that my plane was delayed because my plane was delayed.

I think that airline staff are conditioned to electrocute passengers not only because they think it’s okay – but they think it benefits some greater good for the cloud of airline employees.

In Milgram’s experiment, many of the ‘teachers’ questioned their actions with their colleague before persisting with their electrocutions. And in a similar way, you do find many airline staff appear to be interested in your questions when you first pose them – but that interest lasts a matter of a few seconds before they revert to their conditioned group behavior and become disinterested in your needs.

If the ‘teachers’ are the airline staff, then the ‘experimenters’ must be the senior management. They must be prompting their staff to continue the mistreatment of their passengers until it becomes conditioned that it’s okay to administer the metaphorical 450 volt shocks.

As a passenger, you feel that for the senior management, selling a ticket must be a great feeling, but actually following through and shipping someone around the country must be a real pain.

Have you noticed that there is only one type of happy airline employee? Pilots. Pilots seem to be a very content bunch – look at the survey data. But why? Haven’t they go the most stressful job in the chain of command? Maybe their ’special’ status as an employee makes them detached from the airline organizations and less affected by the group think… At the same time – have you ever noticed how helpful an off-duty airline employee is versus an on-duty one? Next time you fly, just ask. They’re helpful because they feel that they’re not in uniform anymore (even when it’s just covered by a long coat) and are just acting like they do with their friends and neighbors. I’d guess.

Why did my survey suggest that the best European airline was British Airways and the worst Ryan Air? Why was the best US airline Virgin America and the worst American Airlines? What factors make one of these airlines great and another bad? My statistics don’t adequately explain it, but with my experience of travel and consulting with the travel industry I could give a critical reason: Maybe one of the reasons that airlines have this attitude towards passengers is because they believe that they’re in the travel business. I’d like to argue that they are not.

Travel is movement: travel is riding the bus as you look out and see all the shops and people go by; travel is sitting in the back of a taxi watching a sun-kissed New York City shrink in the rear window; travel is riding a bike through the forest as your bike rattles over the roots of trees; travel is sitting on a train passing small towns where you wonder what people do there.

Airlines are not in the travel business: They are in the elevator business. As a passenger, you wait in the lobby, a door opens, you step in, door closes, you wait a while, the door opens and you’re somewhere else. In a way, planes take you up and down not back and forth. The time in a regular elevator ride is so short most people can stomach it. The time people are in a plane is long.

I’d argue that airlines can avoid electrocuting their customers by adjusting their perception of their businesses. They should not think that they’re in the wonderful business of taking people to places they want to go. They think people say about their business, “I love to fly!” But no one does. They say, “I love to travel!” Airlines are lifting people up and down and after your first elevator experience it’s hard to be thrilled. No one says, “I love elevator rides!”

Airlines need to understand that they’re putting people in a box – or several boxes for a lengthy time – and then work out how they want to treat those people. They could do nothing and give us such a low price that we’ll put up with the monotony of the ride or they could give us an experience where we might even pay more for. And if airlines change the way they see their business maybe that will infect everyone who works in the industry and, who knows, if they offer an experience staff want to provide and customers want to receive, maybe we could see a change in everyone’s attitude.

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(Please note that at no point do I say that United Airlines literally electrocuted me. That didn’t happen. It felt much worse than that).