There she was, wedged into her seat and braced for another economy flight, when the smell began wafting back from first class: freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies of which she and her immediate seatmates would get exactly none.
"We could all smell them," said Katy DeCelles, who teaches organizational behaviour at the University of Toronto. "Something like that makes you very aware of the fact that you are not being treated as special as someone else."
That feeling lies behind her latest paper, published Monday, which concludes that inequality between seat classes is the largest single contributor to air rage.
The effect intensifies, DeCelles suggests, when the plebes file past the high rollers during boarding. Nor is the effect limited to travellers of modest means. Airborne inequality makes the rich behave worse, too.
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