98% of People Will Fail This Simple Test of Delayed Gratification

I’m spending several months in New York to make connections and learn about the startup scene here before making the move out to San Francisco to play in the big leagues.

I was lucky to be here for the installation of the subway wait time signs on the A/C line, which has been an interesting study in human behaviors. For those of you unfamiliar, certain subway lines had had these basic signs for years now, but only recently has it been it expanded so that most have them.

It would seem to me something incredibly basic and simple, but as with everything else in the over-capacity public transport system of the world’s most important financial center, there’s probably a lot of complexity under the surface.

The A and C trains during the morning commute between 8–10 have a tendency to get packed like sardine cans. In Japan, the trains arrive like clockwork at regular intervals and proceed swiftly to their destinations. In New York, it’s anarchy.

There is a feedback loop that occurs when a train experiences a delay, in which the delay causes a buildup of people waiting for the train, which causes the train to have more people on it, which causes delays in loading and unloading passengers, which serves to exacerbate the delay.

Behind a substantially delayed train, there is often another train. As the gap between the two trains decreases in time, the crowded front train has a tendency to absorb all passengers, leaving only a few to join the follow train.

This presents an opportunity. In this situation of the two close trains, by simply waiting a minute or two for the follow train, you can enjoy the rare luxury of a subway seat, without even the burden of social pressure to maybe give up your seat to a pregnant lady.

Before the signs, this was a gamble. If you arrived at a subway stop packed full of people (indicating it’s been a long time since a train has arrived), you could often let the next train absorb all the passengers and pass by. But you had to make the leap of faith that another train was close behind.

It’s understandable that most people might not be comfortable enduring the risk that the follow train is far away. This also has some business corollaries, in that we typically engage a probabilistic landscape in business, but I digress.

Now that we have the signs, you’d expect a far greater degree of people taking advantage of this now-available knowledge advantage. Yet, even in the most generous of train gap scenarios, you still see 98% of people trying to cram into the sardine-can train.

The degree difference of experience between a highly-crowded train and an open seat is substantial, and the difference in time cost in insignificant, yet people appear so impatient as to fail to consider this. Their focus on the first-order consequence of waiting just one more minute overcomes the very immediate and real second-order consequence of the miserable train.

It begs the question of why the MTA even decided to install the signs, if the signs won’t impact rider’s behavior at all. While it is emotionally more comfortable to have the knowledge of how long you’ll be waiting, it doesn’t actually change the outcome, that is, if you refuse to let it help you make plans.

For those of us who can weigh first-order-consequences against second, third, and n-order consequences, we operate with a distinct advantage over the majority of people, who apply a greedy algorithm to their life, and suffer for it.

First-order people are destined to be rightful victims of the capitalist system, and those of us who can rise above are rewarded generously.