Illustration: Chris Sharp

Waiting in ticket lines, waiting on the telephone, waiting at restaurants: Service providers have long held the view that waiting angers customers. To lessen the aggravation of waiting, companies have come up with a variety of distractions, from computerized updates on how long the wait will be to cartoons on overhead screens (near the lines at Disney theme parks).

But do these sorts of strategies work for someone facing a stressful event—a root canal procedure, a CAT scan, or, in this post–9/11 era, an airplane flight? Elizabeth Gelfand Miller, an assistant professor of marketing at Boston College, suspected that people often use the delays preceding what she calls “aversive events” constructively, to prepare themselves mentally. In “Consumer Wait Management Strategies for Negative Service Events: A Coping Approach,” published in the February 2008 Journal of Consumer Research, Miller and coauthors Barbara E. Kahn (University of Miami) and Mary Frances Luce (Duke University) describe the results of experiments in which they tested the value of waiting.

In one study, they divided their subjects, 105 college students, into two groups. One group was told they would be delivering a speech before a roomful of classmates and that a public speaking expert would critique their presentation. The second group was told they would be listening to the speeches. The researchers further divided the two groups, with some students informed they would have a two-minute wait before the speeches and others advised their wait would be five minutes.

Afterwards, the subjects rated the stressfulness of their wait. Not surprisingly, students assigned to listen to the speeches experienced less stress with the shorter wait. But the response from subjects waiting to give a speech was quite different; they experienced more stress with the shorter wait than with the longer one.

“The combination of aversive events with short wait times,” Miller and her coauthors theorize, “may interrupt participants’ event-based coping strategies before they run to completion.” The implication: For clients of certain service providers—dentists, for example—some amount of waiting may be desirable.

In a two-part experiment designed to refine these results, Miller and her colleagues administered a standard psychological test—the Multidimensional Coping Inventory—to a fresh pool of subjects, to determine how, as individuals, they generally preferred to deal with impending stressful events. Did they favor avoidance—turning their thoughts toward denial, distractions, or wishful thinking? Or did they approach the prospect head-on by gathering information and formulating ways to reduce the stress?

In the other part of the experiment, the participants were split into two groups. Members of one group were told they would be viewing a disturbing film clip—a video of a missile attack on a passenger train in Kosovo, for example—while members of the other group were told they would be viewing a neutral or pleasurable clip (for instance, images from a weather satellite). All subjects waited at their computers for three minutes before the videos began; some received a digital countdown on their monitor.

For those awaiting the pleasant footage, the digital countdown seemed to help the time pass with less stress. But among those about to view the disturbing clip, the avoiders, in particular, were bothered by the countdown. “Duration information interferes with the coping efforts of avoidance-prone individuals,” said the authors. In other words, it’s hard to put a future event out of mind when you’re constantly being reminded of it.

Miller, who identifies herself as “kind of an avoidance person,” says providers of potentially unpleasant services might help both types of customer deal with waits by offering a variety of coping options. Dentists or doctors, for example, can provide entertaining reading matter, such as current popular magazines, for distraction in their waiting room and—as some already do—discretely supply brochures about dental or medical procedures as well, to help the approachers among their patients gather information.

Miller has another notion that she’d like to test in a future study: Could the right music in the waiting area reduce stress for everyone, regardless of coping strategy?

David Reich is a writer in the Boston area. Judith Wilt’s May 14 interview with Barbara Delinsky may be viewed in its entirety at www.bc.edu/frontrow.

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