Thursday, June 19, 2008

SELF-SELECTION OF THE FITTEST: There's an interesting experiment underway at LAX (Terminal 1, anyway). At the security-checkpoint bottleneck, there are now two lines: one for "expert travelers," and one for everybody else. The only instruction on which line to use is something like "don't use the expert line if you don't know what you're doing." The non-expert line snakes around six or seven times; the expert line is probably 1/3 as long. In addition to being shorter, the expert line moved faster (because everybody knew enough to untie their shoes and have their laptops out of the bag before reaching the front of the line).

Surprisingly, most people chose the non-expert line. I only saw one cheater -- there's always one; this one didn't know that you couldn't take a water bottle through security, that they'd make her take off her shoes, or that she didn't have to unzip her bag for a manual inspection (what is it with airport line-jumpers that makes them think that after getting caught cheating, a public "whoops, I'm cheating!" is going to endear them to everybody else? I think the appropriate punishment here is extra security attention).

It's possible that this experiment was only working because people didn't understand what was going on. It's also possible, though, that people will actually self-select into the proper category (like 10K runners getting into into starting groups depending upon how fast they expect to run the race). I don't know -- is this going to work?

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