In the 1940s, the owners of a New York office building had a complaint problem. Their elevators were too slow. Tenants were furious. Building management got estimates for upgrading the elevator system. The cost ran into the tens of thousands of dollars, and the actual speed improvement would only be a few seconds per trip.
Then someone — the original anecdote attributes this to various engineers and management consultants — proposed a different solution. Don't make the elevators faster. Install full-length mirrors next to them.
The complaints disappeared overnight.
The mirrors didn't speed up the elevators. They gave waiting tenants something to do — check their hair, straighten a tie, glance at their reflection. The idle time stopped feeling like wasted time. The complaint wasn't really about elevator speed. It was about the unpleasantness of having nothing to do for two minutes.
This is, in seventy-year-old anecdotal form, what a University of Chicago behavioral scientist named Chris Hsee would document experimentally in 2010 in a paper called "Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness." It is one of the most useful pieces of behavioral economics for anyone designing customer experience, and almost nobody outside academic psychology has read it.
What Hsee Actually Found
Hsee's experimental design was elegant. He brought college students into a lab, took away their phones and books, and asked them to fill out a quick survey. Then he told them they'd have 15 minutes to wait before the next survey. He gave them a choice: drop their completed survey off at a location right outside the room — a 20-second errand, leaving them roughly 14 minutes of pure waiting — or walk it to a location 6-7 minutes away — leaving them roughly zero minutes of pure waiting because they'd be busy walking.
Most students, given the choice, chose the closer drop-off and then sat doing nothing for 14 minutes. But when Hsee compared self-reported happiness during the wait, the students who had walked were significantly happier than the students who had sat. They had been busier against their will, and the busyness made them feel better.
Hsee ran a follow-up where students had no choice — they were assigned to either the close or far drop-off. The forced-busy students still reported higher happiness than the forced-idle students.
The finding, stated plainly: humans dread idleness, but they need a reason to be busy. Given a choice, we'll opt for laziness. Given an excuse to be active, we're happier.
Hsee opened the paper with a sentence that captures the insight perfectly: "People dread idleness, yet they need a reason to be busy."
Three Operators Who Engineered This
Once you know what to look for, Idleness Aversion is engineered into the experience design of most well-run consumer companies.
Disney's queue engineering. If you've ever waited in line for Space Mountain or the Haunted Mansion, you've stood inside a deliberately designed cognitive distraction. Disney's "Imagineering" team treats queue lines as a separate product. They include interactive games, animatronics, atmospheric audio, visual gags, and embedded plotline elements that pre-load the ride's narrative. The point isn't to make the wait shorter — it's to make the wait feel like engagement, not idleness.
Uber's map. When you order an Uber, the app shows a live animation of your driver's car moving toward you on a map. The map is technically informational, but the primary function is Idleness Aversion. You're not waiting; you're watching. Behavioral research from Uber's own product team has shown that user satisfaction with wait time correlates more strongly with seeing the car move than with the actual length of the wait.
Spotify's progress bars during playlist loading. Loading an algorithmic playlist takes milliseconds. The visible progress bar takes seconds. The bar is a deliberate Idleness Aversion device — same family as the airline-search progress bars I've written about elsewhere in the Operational Transparency / Labor Illusion territory.
Where Idleness Aversion Crosses Into Manipulation
The dark side of this is what Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology have been writing about for years. The same Idleness Aversion mechanism that makes Disney's queue feel shorter also makes TikTok's infinite scroll physically uncomfortable to put down. The brain doesn't tolerate idle moments well, and the modern smartphone exists in part to ensure you never have to.
This is where the Hsee finding moves from useful design insight to ethically uncomfortable. There's a difference between removing the unpleasantness of unavoidable waiting (mirrors next to elevators, games in queues, maps in ride-share apps) and manufacturing artificial wait states to keep users engaged (infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications). The first respects the user's time. The second exploits the user's brain.
The diagnostic question I'd ask of any Idleness Aversion intervention is: is the user's life better because of this? If the answer is yes, you're solving a real problem. If the answer is no — if you're just keeping them busy because their being busy is good for your engagement metrics — you've crossed into Harris territory.
The elevator mirrors solved a real problem. Many of the apps on your phone don't.