onny Gerkin, a psychiatrist at the University of North Carolina, told me that both airport arrival styles are likely just different ways of approaching the same emotional problem: the extreme anxiety of air travel. “One person is hyper-efficient and overprepared, and another is someone who doesn’t manage their anxiety that way,” Gerkin said. It’s not that late people don’t find the airport as stressful as early people do, in other words, but that their coping mechanisms indicate a fundamentally different approach to the negative parts of life.
“They distract and procrastinate, and next thing you know, they can’t do what they need to do to get there on time,” Gerkin said. “It’s not quite self-harm, but it’s in the same arena. It changes your feeling state and gets you out of that place that’s uncomfortable and into this place of excitement.” This can mean that even for people who experience higher risks from airport lateness—those who can’t afford rebooking fees, or members of ethnic groups more likely to be stopped for additional security checks—the siren song of lateness can be just as tempting. In some individuals, the additional stress of those factors might make lateness an even more attractive coping mechanism.
Gerkin’s theory is in line with much of the research on the personality-based reasons people are late in general. According to Jeffrey Conte, an organizational psychologist at San Diego State University, type-A people—those who tend to be impatient and ambitious—are often punctual. Type Bs, who tend to be more relaxed and less neurotic, generally arrive later. Still, he says there are often mitigating factors, like how the culture in which someone grows up views punctuality in the first place, and whether or not someone has kids. “The relationships between personality characteristics and lateness are not what we would call strong (because there are other factors), but they are consistent,” Conte explained via email.
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