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.

译文：

扶手争夺战

下午好，我是机长。我们现在正处于巡航高度，还会飞行3个小时，希望你旅途愉快。

这意味着谁将会得到扶手-你或者你旁边的邻居。噢，我知道椅子这样设计就是为了让两个乘客共用一个扶手。当然，我们可以给所有的座位配有自己单独的扶手，但是从社会心理学的角度看，飞机航班就会减少很多乐趣。所以你不会介意的是吧?

实际上你很介意。3名社会心理学家对20架航班上的426对乘客关于谁应该得到饱受争议的扶手进行了研究，观察的对象一般是坐在女性旁边的男性。猜猜是谁大部分时间使用扶手?

是的，男性。有两倍?还是三倍?恐怕是五倍。男性主宰着这个没有明确归属的社会空间。如果把实验面向相同体型的人，这个数据将会下降。尽管如此，男性使用扶手的频率仍然是女性的三倍。

在飞行后的采访中，68%的男性表示他们为别人霸占扶手而感到烦恼，而女性只有42%有此同感。

那么，是不是所有男性都如此不绅士呢?你可以质疑这些数据显示的结果，但是有一点是不容质疑的：小小的塑料扶手已成为了一个争夺战场。